This book is about the challenges posed by key municipal events in what some have called âmonument warsâ1 or âstatue wars,â2 and it extends the work of interdisciplinary theorists who are interested in the study of both urban American cityscapes and public memoryscapes. Our interest in this topic comes in the wake of heated debates that have taken place after several traumatic events: the attack by Dylann Roof on the congregation assembled at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, where nine individuals lost their lives;3 the August 12, 2017 confrontations on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia; and the 2019 shootings of praying Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand.4 All sorts of disagreements about how to remember, or forget, particular ways of viewing victimage and racialized histories have impacted how city residents have been turned into targets by domestic terrorists and others who seem to be declaring war on precarious urban landscapes.
We are convinced that these attacks by white nationalists and others are harbingers of things to come, as members of communities who once worried about the horrific losses on military battlefields are now having to fight ideological conflicts in cities that are now treated as if they are under siege. We are finding that the older academic disputes over the meaning of the âcultural warsâ have spilled over into more than just verbal or textual exchanges as decision-makers, scholars, police, judges, investigative journalists, and lay persons in cityscapes hear about how armed protesters in cities chant âyou will not replace usâ as they march through downtown streets.5 Patricia Davis, writing in the Southern Communication Journal, averred that the âpolitics of memory, race, and place in southern cityscapes have inspired new areas of inquiry as two interrelated phenomenon have conspired to change the urban fabric.â6
Is it possible that we are just now beginning to realize that some cities are trying to gain control and have some say as they deal with everything from the building of Trumpian walls at the borders to legal standing of âsanctuaryâ cities7 to ways that Americans should assess what happened with the death of Michael Brown and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri?8 Are we only now coming to realize the lingering traumas that are felt by a resilient New York City have something to do with contested memoryscapes or cityscapes as various cultural topographies are linked to violent pasts, presents, and futures? Is this the time when critics need to follow those who are interested in network-centric theories, dingpolitik (the politics of things), or ânew materialismâ as we endeavor to come up with theories and methods that allow us to understand the complex dynamics of the rhetoricity of cities?9
Clearly there are those scholars working in urban studies, political geography, security studies, cultural studies, or critical sociology and related disciplines who have been asking academic communities to rethink notions of social agency. Ash Amin, writing in the journal City in 2007, had this to say:
Is it possible that we can see how cities, and portions of cities, may be caught up in salient national public controversies? Have cities, for instances, had to make decisions regarding how to participate, or not participate, in monument wars?The social has been largely grasped in the area of human experience. The non-humanâincluding the built environment, nature, technology, infrastructure, animal, and viral lifeâhas not been allowed to feature as part of the social. Accounts of urban social life have tended to engage only marginally with the body of social theory associated with the work of Delueze and Guattari, de Lande, Ingold, Law, Latour, Haraway, and others who steadfastly refuse to reduce the social to the human.10
Extending the work of urban studies researchers, critical rhetoricians, political geographers, memory studies scholars, and others who are interested in the study of collective traumas and public memories that are associated with dark tourism, urban violence, and related phenomenon, we invite readers to focus on citiesâ reactions to various racial divides, societal fissures, and wounds that can be linked to various acts of commemorative remembering and forgetting. As Professor Barbie Zelizer has argued elsewhere, collective memories that are purveyed by state-sponsored memorialists involve âthe fabrication, rearrangement, elaboration, and omission of details about the pastâ as matters of âaccuracy and authenticityâ are pushed aside so as to âaccommodate broader issues of identity formation, power, and political affiliation,â11 and we would extend this to advocate for investigations of why cities choose to remember or forget particular real or imagined urban histories or municipal memories.
That said, we recognize the politicized, contentious, and affective nature of some studies that critique the activities of cities that may be producing memoryscapes that others might find objectionable. Notice, for example, how many of the memorial museums that are going up in Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, or Croatia invite visitors to consider the âdouble genocideâ that may have been perpetrated by Stalinâs communists during the famine years before the advent of the Nazi Holocaust.12 Are these citiesâ museums and memorials and other commemorative sites authentically recollecting the mass violence that was perpetrated during the Judeocideâproducing what Michael Rothberg has called âmultidirectionalâ memories13âor are they inviting Eastern Europeans to engage in official and unofficial victimage wars that focus more on post-1989 anxieties?
We are obviously not the first interdisciplinary scholars who have called attention to the growing rhetoricity of various citiesâ monuments, statues, parks, cemeteries, and other sites of commemoration. In 1993, for example, Bryan Cheyette, in his review of some of James Youngâs work on the âtexture of memoryâ and the ârhetoric of ruins,â noted how in the aftermath of traumatic events like World War II âmemorials and monuments built to commemorate thoseâ who âperished in the death camps became more conspicuous.â14 During the following decades all sorts of studies of collective memories, monuments, museums, and other âsites of memoryâ flourished to the point where many started writing about the surfeit of memory studies. By 2008 Erika Doss could write about the âmemorial maniaâ that was capturing the attention of so Americans,15 and there was little question that both public and scholarly interests were driving what many regarded as the âmemory boom.â16
Transcontinental debates about what to do with immigration populations at Calais17 were soon being linked to geopolitical disputes about everything from the population demographics of cities to the growing power of âalternative rightâ (alt-right) on several continents. Oftentimes, in contingent, unexpected, and dramatic ways disputes over national heritage, monumentalization, race, population density, identity politics, and even colonialism were linked demands that objectionable statues be taken down and replaced with less objectionable objects. For instance, in 2015 students on college campuses in South Africa began a movement known as âRhodes Must Fall,â demanding the taking down of statues of the British imperial expansionist Cecil Rhodes, and when these same rhetorical impulses traveled to England they were met by what Amit Chaudhuri called the ânationâs long retreat from multiculturalism and the return of a rose-tinted memory of empire.â18
The political shockwaves that could be felt in the aftermath of Donald Trumpâs presidential victory were soon followed by violence in several cities as various factions prepared for a new type of urban warfare that harkened back to the 1960s civil r...