The Era of Monuments: Colonial Heritage, Grammar of Sensibility and Aesthetics Ruptures as a Political Alternatives for Our Time
Guest Editors:
Roberto Almanza Hernández
Universidad del Magdalena
ralmanza@unimagdalena.edu.co
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9089-468X
Marcela Landazábal
Institute of Aesthetic Research, UNAM
mlandazabalm@gmail.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6867-3242
Monuments are more alive than ever. We are looking back to these structures that may seem discreet for many, a part of urban landscape and the record of a history of naturalized colonial violence. We witness a vibrant time for stone monuments —a Colonial and Republican stamp—, which does not mean that reactions to them are a phenomenon of late. Instead, the latest interpellations on them, within a context of climate and pandemic breakdown, suggest a circumstantial, systemic, performative, and political phenomenon —a poetic decolonial one for some. Monuments play a central role today, as they are put to public trial, they are defended, intervened, transvestited, «vandalized», brought down. We are witnessing a fight for remembrance, led by human beings negatively racialized and highly exploited by colonialism and its custodians. They see monuments as an open affront from an official narrative that legitimates racialization and structural inequality. Nowadays «problem» subjects —for our White-Mestizo bourgeois nations’ narratives and infrastructure— have taken history into their own hands, while the academy tries and make sense of those events.
In tandem with the aim to read these iconoclastic and creative expressions aided with the best analysis tools, we have conceived this monographic special issue to call for papers delivering critical reflections upon today’s grammars in interventions, statue and monument knockdowns, and their relation to subalternized groups’ historic and social vindications. Critical collectives enacting fights for historic dignity, such as anti-racist and ethnic integration movements across Latin America, but in Asia and Africa too, feminist movements, LGTBI, resistance in the Middle East to the imperialist military bloodbath, care networks made up by victims’ mothers and relatives in various conflicts, call official records into question, and, more recently, the outstanding mobilization of large youth collectives, challenging the precarization of their life within the current hegemonic order.
This issue aims to open a forum for varied disciplinary horizons to weave a joint reflection from the fields of aesthetics, arts, visual culture, anthropology, sociology, critical and decolonial theory that allow us reading the time of monuments from a global systemic perspective.
To get further information or submit a complete manuscript along with its abstract (written in English or Spanish), please email Roberto Almanza Hernández at ralmanza@unimagdalena.edu.co and/or Marcela Landazábal, at mlandazabalm@gmail.com
Deadline for manuscript submission: January 30, 2022
Manuscripts must be previously unpublished and conform to the journal Author’s Guide: https://www.revistatabularasa.org/normas/
