Every Monument Will Fall

There's a culture war, we're told. Or maybe it's a war on culture - a war with a deeper and more troubling history than you might think.<BR><BR>Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, colonialism and memory, Dan Hicks joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the acquisition of stolen art and ancestral human remains.<BR><BR>Part history, part biography, part excavation, Every Monument Will Fall pulls at a thread that runs through this history - from country houses in the Yorkshire Wolds to Caribbean plantations and from the battlefields of Crimea and the American Civil War to British colonial outposts in southern Ireland. The book holds the memorialisations of men like Cecil Rhodes and General Augustus Pitt-Rivers up against the writing of Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall and Ursula Le Guin, drawing together open secrets about dehumanisation and the redaction of public memory.<BR><BR>What emerges is a speculative history of inheritance, loss, collective mourning, and the possibility of a reconciliation that has not yet begun. This is a story about who gets named and who doesn't, who is remembered and who is forgotten; who has been treated as human and who has not.<BR><BR>Refusing to choose between pulling down every single statue, or holding onto every last vestige of a past that future generations could never change, Every Monument Will Fall makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while. The result is an urgent appeal to reassemble the fragments, listen to the silences, value life and humanity above material things - and to rebuild a new kind of memory culture.

New York Times 'Best Art Books' 2020'Essential' - Sunday Times'Brilliantly enraged' - New York Review of Books'A real game-changer'- EconomistWalk into any Western museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen.Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of metal plaques and sculptures depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections.The Brutish Museums sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. Since its first publication, museums across the western world have begun to return their Bronzes to Nigeria, heralding a new era in the way we understand the collections of empire we once took for granted.