Introduction
On July 26, 2020, members of the militant collective Rouge-Vert-Noir (RVN) gathered at the edge of La Savane, a popular park in the center of Fort-de-France, Martinique, and graffitied the surrounding area with political slogans – “Death to colonialism” and “French racist state.” At the center of their gathering was a weathered, headless, nineteenth-century white marble statue whose neckline had been smeared with red paint. Its subject was Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais, first wife of Emperor Napoléon I. The young activists tied ropes around the statue, beat it with clubs, and pulled it down, taking much of the white marble plinth with it. They smashed what remained of the plinth with sledgehammers, broke the statue into pieces, covered it with dried palm fronds, and set it on fire.
Only one month earlier, President Emmanuel Macron had held a televised address, proclaiming, “The Republic will not wipe away any trace or any name from its history … but lucidly look at our history and our memory together” (Macron Reference Macron2020, my translation). After the toppling of Joséphine, Bruno Retailleau, President of the center-right party Les Républicains, lamented that “the destruction of statues in Fort-de-France is a double shame … shame for the authors who destroy our common history in this way. Shame on the state which is not able to protect our heritage” (Retailleau Reference Retailleau2020, my translation). For both politicians, toppling the statue had triggered a crisis of historical erasure – of cultural heritage, of its historical subject, and of the nation’s history. The crisis they identified was new and enacted in the present, but it threatened to infringe upon the past. Undermining the past, conversely, threatened to destabilize the present: erasing national heroes and the values they represented could destabilize the very premise of contemporary national solidarity.
Left unspoken, both by politicians and by the media uproar that followed, was a larger crisis of historical subjectivity rooted in racism and colonialism. This crisis was centuries old and woven into the very narrative of national history that politicians now sought to defend. At its core was a racialized understanding of historical ontology that imagined white metropolitans as subjects who made sense of the social world. It was their individual stories and their collective memories that forged national history. Black colonial subjects, conversely, were objects of history, deprived of human agency and of the ability to make sense of the social world. They were acted upon, trafficked, enslaved, and eventually liberated (by white subjects). The authors of colonial history silenced narratives that granted subjectivity to enslaved and colonized people, including narratives of uprisings and revolutions (Fleming Reference Fleming2017; Trouillot Reference Trouillot1995). Instead, they erected statues, wrote textbooks, and enacted commemorative ceremonies that celebrated the historical subjectivity of national heroes.
In what follows, I discuss what it means to erect statues in public space and how doing so gives material form to colonial discourses. Within this context, I make sense of the transnational movement to topple statues in the summer of 2020, the backlash against that movement, and its afterlives. I argue that framing the toppling of statues as a historical “crisis” derives from a colonial understanding of knowledge as singular, universal, and fundamentally European.Footnote 1 In so doing, it analytically bifurcates the past and refuses anti-colonial histories of insurgency and contestation. To counter this approach, I introduce the concept of postcolonial critical realism (PCR), which theorizes the power of colonial discourses to shape material institutions and esthetic forms, as well as the anti-colonial potential of counter-discourses. I argue, further, that in the nineteenth century, erecting statues of enslavers and colonizers actively contributed to a racialized, colonial crisis of historical subjectivity. By revisiting this crisis and the responses it engendered, we can make sense of the present “culture war” not as a contemporary crisis but as a response to a longer historical crisis.
Colonial discourses
European colonialism was, at its core, an epistemic project: it was the claim that one society was superior to another and that its superior status entitled it to rule. As such, colonial discourses took shape alongside race-thinking and produced the coloniality of power (Quijano Reference Quijano2000). Military conquest, economic extraction, and political domination gave colonialism a material, measurable dimension. It was the production, dissemination, and internalization of colonial discourses, however, that provided support for imperialism throughout the empire and ensured that coloniality would endure long after the formal end of the empire. Fundamentally, colonial discourses proclaimed access to a singular, universal truth to which Europeans and their descendants alone held access (Grosfoguel Reference Grosfoguel and Paraskeva2017).
What Haraway (Reference Haraway1988) refers to as the “God trick” laid claim to universality and objectivity by erasing colonized knowledges. Colonial elites analytically bifurcated European history and ideas from their global context (Go Reference Go2016). That is, they depicted scientific and economic progress, and the knowledges underpinning them, as originating in Europe. In so doing, they erased the global, imperial systems of power that had enabled European societies to develop through the extraction and underdevelopment of non-European societies. This changed their reading of non-European discourses, which they depicted as provincial, primitive, and distinct from their European counterparts. Importantly, the distinction between European and non-European knowledges had a temporal, historical dimension: amid the celebration of European modernity, Indigenous colonized subjects were perpetually consigned to the past and degraded as “pre-modern” (Dube Reference Dube2017). European history was depicted as having emerged ex nihilo, in Europe, through the ingenuity of (Northern) Europeans (Mignolo Reference Mignolo1999). Omitted from this narrative of history were the ways in which European identities were constructed and racialized in direct opposition to non-European identities, the expansion of Europe through the dispossession of Indigenous people, and the enrichment of Europe through the extraction and enslavement of Africans. Equally, long histories of resistance to European colonialism were erased in the service of the dominant narrative that the empire was consensual.
Historical narratives, in sum, are the product of colonial thinking and are central to its perpetuation. Acknowledging the transnational histories of colonialism, slavery, and resistance would have compromised the universality of European knowledges. Separating non-European histories and either depicting them as incidental or erasing them altogether enabled the maintenance of European hegemony.
Refuting analytic bifurcation requires rethinking how the social world fits together: it problematizes the very possibility of making universal claims about the social world or of enacting the “God trick.” Yet the alternative – claiming that every experience is situated and particular and focusing solely on micro-level theorizing – undermines the potential for identifying historical patterns and supporting transnational solidarities. The reality of racism and colonialism demands a social theory that recognizes the globality of historic systems of oppression alongside the differential ways in which people experience them in the present. In the section that follows, I argue, drawing from critical realism, that making universal claims about the social world is power-laden and rooted in colonial discourses. By extension, the real material infrastructure and esthetic expressions of colonialism – including its statues and monuments – are an attempt to conform the social world to colonial discourses.
Postcolonial critical realism
A PCR begins with the critical realist claim that the social world is stratified into domains, such that the same social structures produce different experiences for different people. The domain of the real, which consists of social structures, underpins the social world and exists independently of human understanding. These structures produce events in the domain of the actual. Human beings experience those events indirectly, in the domain of the empirical (Bhaskar Reference Bhaskar1975). The stratification of the social world points to the five tenets of PCR (Tinsley Reference Tinsley2022). First, colonial discourses precede and underlie material structures. Discourse, on this basis, is not simply knowledge about an object; it is also, in line with Foucault (Reference Foucault1978), knowledge that produces an object. As discussed in the previous section, colonial discourses have an important historical dimension: Christian missionaries preceded militaries in the colonial encounter, schools instructed the colonized elite in a Eurocentric curriculum, and European languages supplanted Indigenous languages in public affairs. Equally, centuries later, erecting statues of colonial elites and celebrating national continuity with the colonial past inhibit critical engagement with history. In each instance, discourse makes the materiality of colonialism conceivable.
Second, coloniality is a global phenomenon made visible through events and lived experiences that vary across time and space. This means that the effects of the power-laden system of knowledge underpinning the social world are felt unevenly. Erecting a statue of a slaveholding empress in Martinique, for example, was a proclamation of pride and fidelity to her nephew, Napoléon III, and to the Second Empire. For the people whose ancestors had been enslaved by her family, however, the statue of the Empress was a proclamation of a violent racial hierarchy.
Third, subaltern lived experiences provide insights into the nature of reality at large. This tenet, which draws from the feminist standpoint theory (Harding Reference Harding1986; Hill Collins Reference Hill Collins and Harding2004) alongside postcolonial writing on liminality (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994) and opacity (Glissant Reference Glissant1990), carries two cautions: First, the nature of reality at large – independent of human knowledge about reality – is not singular. While powerful social forces underlie material structures, they produce varying events under particular circumstances. As a second caution, subalternity refers to a person’s position within the colonial social world rather than any essential group characteristic. This means that there is no fixed or singular subaltern standpoint, nor is there any guarantee that a person who occupies a subaltern position in the social world will hold a critical perspective on coloniality. Occupying a subaltern position, however, does provide epistemic priority (Grosfoguel Reference Grosfoguel2007; Maldonado-Torres Reference Maldonado-Torres2007): people who find themselves on the margins of the colonial social order, by virtue of their own experience, are more likely to experience perspectival shifts, leading them to recognize that the social world is marked with profound, patterned inequalities than are people who find themselves in the dominant group (Harding Reference Harding, Alcoff and Potter1993). Consequently, in line with standpoint theory, subaltern lived experiences – located in the domain of the empirical – reflect and reveal the coloniality of the social world at large. Given the resources required to erect and maintain statues in public space, members of subaltern groups are less likely to commemorate their stories and memories with triumphant monuments. They play a crucial role, however, in contesting those monuments and in creating and maintaining unsanctioned counter-monuments.
A fourth tenet of PCR holds that coloniality is power-laden, sticky, and often invisible. The three domains of the social world are interconnected and interdependent, such that events and experiences thereof hold the potential to shape the materiality of social structures (a process Bhaskar (Reference Bhaskar1992) calls emergence). For example, everyday experiences of being excluded from and unwelcome in public space might be invisible to members of a dominant group. Yet, for people who are othered by the dominant narrative of history, statues of colonizers and slaveholders may enact racial terror. When cultural activists react by contesting statues in public space – dousing them with paint, beheading them, or even toppling them – the enactment of racial terror in the domain of the actual and the experience thereof in the domain of the empirical lead people to change the material domain of the real. In doing so, however, cultural activists and official bodies (who may also elect to remove contested statues) risk reducing the real to the material. In the aftermath of toppling a statue, stakeholders must recognize and continue to challenge the colonial knowledges that made it possible to erect the statues in the first place. Indeed, in Martinique, the anti-colonial movement that sought to bring down statues is closely linked with the environmental justice movement: the activists argue that colonial ways of thinking have justified destructive plantation agriculture alongside monuments to colonial rulers. Thus, after toppling the statue of Joséphine, activists transformed the foundation of her empty plinth into a community permaculture planter. Challenging either environmental destruction or colonial monuments is incomplete without recognizing the links between them and the discourses that underpin them.
The final tenet of PCR holds that decolonization must be both global and variegated, targeting all three domains of the social world and their discursive interactions. Cultural activists in Martinique and Richmond illustrate this point powerfully. The movements targeted statues because they made colonial knowledges material, and represented the myriad other ways – from state violence to structural adjustment – that the legacies of colonialism continued to shape lived experience in racialized ways. Further, with their accusations of “erasing history,” those who sought to “defend” the statues implicitly acknowledged that the statues stood in for less tangible systems of knowledge that underpinned them. By extension, toppling a statue is never the end of its contestation. Stakeholders debate whether (and how) a statue should find a new home in a museum or cemetery, be stored in an undisclosed location, or be dumped unceremoniously into a harbor. They also debate whether the space a statue once occupied should host a new statue of an anti-racist hero, a rotating public art exhibition, or (as in Martinique) a conspicuously empty plinth. In the process, they debate how and whether colonial discourses might be overcome and what might replace them.
Taken together, these five tenets theorize the reality of the social world in a way that foregrounds colonial discourses and knowledges, makes a global claim about the nature of the social world, and makes sense of differential lived experiences while acknowledging epistemic privilege. Further, they point toward the possibility of decolonization, arguing that the reality of coloniality is not absolute or inevitable but that human beings can shape the reality of the social world.
Colonial discourses, commemoration, and “culture wars”
A PCR framework provides new insight into the relationship between knowledge and violence – whether epistemic, symbolic, or physical. Because coloniality underlies reality at large, the imposition of colonial discourses affects every domain of the social world. The aim of imposing colonial discourses is to create and enforce a hegemonic way of knowing. Colonial discourses proclaim their universality and forcefully displace other ways of thinking. By extension, colonial discourses produce racialized political, economic, and social institutions that supplant other ways of being (Quijano Reference Quijano2000). Conversely, allowing space for non-hegemonic knowledges undermines the universality of colonial knowledges and delegitimizes the material structures that colonial discourses produce.
Erecting statues of human figures in public space is a long-standing tactic of imposing a singular narrative of complex histories. To give salience to the nation, elites set about disseminating a sense of collective identity among a diverse population by creating the memory of a shared past. As such, they entrench their understanding of historical subjectivity, privileging some histories and experiences over others, and inventing traditions to commemorate them (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm and Ranger1982; Nora Reference Nora1989). Statues in public space – which require planning permission, building materials, artistic license, and regular maintenance – take on a particular role as the visible sites where official narratives of the past are localized (Hoelscher and Alderman Reference Hoelscher and Alderman2004). These establish heroes and demand public recognition (Michalski Reference Michalski2013). As such, their materiality is an expression of the colonial discourses that underpin the domain of the real.
The size and matter of monuments lend an impression of permanence, which often receives legal backing from planning and heritage boards. Further, the human form of statues makes them appear sacrosanct: contesting a statue is equated with doing violence to a human being (Dunstan Reference Dunstan2016), which brings allegations of perpetrating a “culture war.” Such a claim overlooks the violence of erecting and maintaining statues that embody and reinforce colonial knowledges. Generations after its construction, a statue’s presence continues to alter the way that urban-dwellers navigate public space. This holds true even when the historical figure it depicts ceases to be part of public consciousness. Long after the novelty of a statue wanes and its subject fades from organic memory, a statue retains power by its very ordinariness, forming part of the omnipresent but uninterrogated backdrop of everyday life (Billig Reference Billig1995; Edensor Reference Edensor2019). Ordinary statues quietly remind the public of what a hero “looks like”: overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white, frequently a military leader or member of a royal family. Venerating some individuals as significant for the contemporary public gives legitimacy to the elite and creates the appearance of permanency (Closs Stephens Reference Closs Stephens2013). In so doing, it reinforces the reality of colonial discourses. Further, as it recalls the past, collective memory shores up a sense of collective identity for generations to come (Sumartojo Reference Sumartojo2021).
Alongside the stories they tell about the past, statues articulate particular configurations of power in the present (Kostof Reference Kostof1991). This produces an ongoing crisis of historical subjectivity, in which collective memory is always violently contested. In order for one narrative to gain prominence over others, it must conquer the space occupied by competing narratives. Space is discursive: the dominant narrative is disseminated through commemorative ceremonies and national days, history textbooks, and political speeches. Space is also physical: the dominant narrative occupies museums, place names, and monuments.
By their very materiality, statues betray the contingency of past and present. Even as colonial discourses structure the social world, history is neither neutral nor uncontested (Bell Reference Bell2008; Sumartojo Reference Sumartojo, Bevernage and Wouters2018). Indeed, members of the public make sense of statues in light of their own experiences, attempting to impose their own meanings on apparently authoritative stones (Savage Reference Savage2011). Through a critical realist lens, people understand the social world within the domain of the empirical, which points toward the domain of the real. This may entail erecting monuments that valorize radical histories and lionize the oppressed. The obstacles that stakeholders face in raising funds and obtaining planning permission demonstrate the power dynamics of memorialization. Equally, they demonstrate the pitfalls of relying upon statues and monuments as pedagogical tools: monuments to radical and oppressed figures, like monuments to enslavers and colonizers, simplify complex stories and lives (Pickering and Tyrell Reference Pickering and Tyrell2004). Statues set the past in stone; stone, however, is vulnerable to crumbling. Likewise, simply proclaiming that a particular version of history is authoritative invites evidence of other memories. Grappling creatively and critically with the past is an act of insurgency that both reflects and reproduces counternarratives of the present (Young Reference Young1993).
Because statues give material form to the dominant narrative of past and present, contesting statues is a means of openly, visibly challenging that narrative. Contesting a statue paradoxically makes it hyper-visible, as the public is reminded of a historical figure anew. Yet as Gusejnova (Reference Gusejnova2018) argues, a type of public “derecognition” – which removes a historical figure’s superhuman status and reminds the public of what they actually believed and did – is necessary in order to symbolically topple them. Derecognition, in turn, typically arises from and facilitates a larger set of demands for recognition and equality that are focused on the national present and future, with implications for the authority of colonial discourses.
This was exactly the strategy that a first generation of post-departmentalization policymakers, artists, and intellectuals took in Martinique. As mayor of Fort-de-France, Aimé Césaire set out to “cannibalize” the city’s colonial monuments by moving them to less prominent settings, deliberately retaining vandals’ paint and damage to the stone, and – in one case – surrounding a colonial monument with a fresco celebrating Indigenous resistance to colonialism. This approach, while comparatively quiet and unspectacular, unmasked the colonial discourses that had built Fort-de-France as fallible myths. This, in turn, set the stage for future generations to topple the statues of colonizers.
The social, political, and cultural significance of statues means that waves of statue-building frequently coincide with battles over nation-building and urban planning. As such, they clearly delineate and spatialize belonging and unbelonging. Post-2020 cultural politics is no exception: Even as cultural activists have challenged statues of enslavers and colonizers in public space, policymakers across the political spectrum have called for the erection of new statues. In some cases, these are reactionary calls to “defend” the dominant narrative of history. In others, they represent an additive approach to memory, wherein contradictory narratives could be depicted side by side. While the former approach forcefully affirms the dominant narrative of history, the latter challenges the hegemony of any single narrative. It fails, however, to acknowledge the violent process by which one narrative of the past suppressed others.
The material stakes of contesting colonial discourses, and the possibility of violence it contains, are implicit in the widely utilized term “culture war.” Missing from the term, however, are the stark imbalances of power it entails: as PCR demonstrates, the contestation of colonial discourses is less a “war” between equals than an anti-colonial insurgency against an entrenched power that underpins the social world. Colonial discourses produce and dominate a range of institutions including the media, the state, and educational institutions. They also erect statues and monuments that set the memories and myths of colonialism in stone. People, in turn, experience colonial knowledges about the past in ways that are mediated by monuments and the events that happen to monuments – from weathering and decay to restoration. Yet people’s actions – restoring, altering, or toppling – can also shape the materiality of statues. In so doing, they honor or defame the histories that the statues honor – and, in turn, entrench or threaten colonial knowledges. For critical realists, this constitutes emergence, wherein lived experiences and events shape the material reality of the social world (Bhaskar Reference Bhaskar1992). The potential of human action to undermine colonial discourses explains the violence with which cultural activism is often suppressed: it is not simply statues that are at stake but the very logic of a system of power. Those who hold power thus set about policing the crisis, with the goal of restoring their narrative of historical subjectivity. A “war” over knowledges plays out in space, and it holds implications for economic, political, and military structures.
While activists may emphasize a particular counternarrative of the past, to topple a statue is to demonstrate that the meaning of past and present is not fixed. In the aftermath of a toppling, this question comes to a head: razing a contested site of memory, erecting a new statue, or commissioning an art installation necessarily entails elevating one historical narrative over others. Empty plinths and defaced statues open up the possibility of multiple, uneasy memories and counter-memories (Forsdick Reference Forsdick2012). By extension, the visibility of contesting a statue brings renewed charges of waging a “culture war.”
Tracing the contestation of statues
To trace the articulation of colonial discourses; the ways in which these produce material reality, varied and power-laden events, and lived experiences; and the processes of contesting them from below through the lens of PCR, I discuss the history of two statues: Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, and Joséphine de Beauharnais in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Both statues and the movements that toppled them received global attention in the summer of 2020. Yet in the international press, both were generally delocalized, dehistoricized, and folded into the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This has led both, at times, to be depicted as tropes that serve a generalized narrative of a global culture war.
I draw from semi-structured interviews with 13 stakeholders conducted between 2021 and 2025. These include local government officials and consultants, community historians, artists, and cultural activists. I also draw from archival research and contemporary print media, which enable me to trace the contestation of each statue across time and to link each statue’s history to social movements and political change, both locally and transnationally. In each case, I explore how a crisis of historical subjectivity culminated in erecting a statue. I then discuss how people who were denied historical subjectivity responded to the crisis by contesting the statue. Generations of racialized and colonized people continued this struggle for their own subjectivity, eventually – over a century later – creating material space for their own histories and memories by toppling the statue. In both cases, contesting the statue made the struggle for historical subjectivity visible and public, but toppling the statue did not signal the end of that struggle. Rather, stakeholders raised new questions about what should happen to a toppled statue and what should replace it on an emptied plinth. By reducing this history to a contemporary “culture war,” the defenders of the dominant historical narrative attempt to deny historical subjectivity to racialized and colonized people once again.
Case study 1: Robert E. Lee in Richmond
In 1890, a monumental statue of Robert E. Lee was sculpted by Antonin Mercié in France, shipped to Virginia, and installed on Monument Avenue in Richmond. The 4.3-meter statue, which sat atop an imposing 14-meter marble plinth, was funded by the Lee Monument Association (led by Lee’s nephew, former Confederate general and Virginia governor Fitzhugh Lee). The Commonwealth of Virginia issued bonds to support the statue’s construction, and the City of Richmond funded its carnivalesque inauguration. While Lee’s statue was the first to be inaugurated on Monument Avenue, it heralded an unprecedented, nationwide wave of Confederate statues erected at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century (Southern Poverty Law Center 2022). On Monument Avenue, too, other statues followed Lee’s: William Carter Wickham in Monroe Park (1891); General A. P. Hill at Laburnum Avenue and Hermitage Road (1892); Richmond Howitzers at Harrison, Park and Grove Avenues (1892); Confederate Soldiers and Sailors at Libby Hill (1894); General William “Extra Billy” Smith in Capitol Square (1906); and General J. E. B. Stuart (1907), Confederate President Jefferson Davis (1907), General “Stonewall” Jackson (1919), and Admiral Matthew Fontaine Maury (1929), all on Monument Avenue.
The memorialization of the Confederacy followed the changing knowledges of the post-Civil War years. Reconstruction had been an ideological project as well as a political and economic one: its proponents imagined a new future for formerly enslaved people and their descendants, an active reckoning with the Confederate past, and new forms of collective identity and solidarity in the US South. Through a postcolonial critical realist lens, material policies followed the discourses of Reconstruction, including the possibility of economic reparations for enslaved people and the advent of Black political power in Congress and state capitols. Notably, in the first 12 years after the defeat of the Confederacy, only 13 monuments to the Confederacy were erected nationwide (Best Reference Best2020). Yet white supremacist backlash doomed the project of Reconstruction and created ideological and cultural space for the colonial discourse of the “Lost Cause.” Thus, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and allied organizations dedicated to rehabilitating the memory of the Confederacy began to set the Lost Cause in stone, giving a material dimension to a colonial discourse. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Confederate sympathizers erected dozens of statues, peaking in 1911 with 50 new monuments (Southern Poverty Law Center 2022). Within this context, the monuments imposed colonial knowledges while enacting racial terror in material space. This project altered the commemorative geography of the US South, such that 40 years later, reflecting on his travels across the region, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1931: 279) wrote in Crisis:
The most terrible thing about War, I am convinced, is its monuments – the awful things we are compelled to build in order to remember the victims. In the South, particularly, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain on its war monuments, the Confederacy. Of course, the plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.” But that reads with increasing difficulty as time goes on. It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: “Died Fighting for Liberty!”
In Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, the memory of the Lost Cause was a powerful weapon in the construction of another material expression of a colonial discourse: the modern, white supremacist city. Monument Avenue itself was a planned, all-white community, constructed near – and in response to – a thriving Black, middle-class neighborhood. On many maps of Richmond, Lee Circle is in the geographic center. The significance of erecting a Confederate statue there was not lost on Black Richmonders, who opposed it from the outset. John Mitchell, Jr., an anti-lynching campaigner who had been born into slavery, was a member of the Richmond City Council and editor of the Richmond Planet. Alongside the two other Black members of the Council, Mitchell vehemently opposed the statue; the white majority, however, voted in its favor and allocated public funds for its construction. Mitchell, writing in the Richmond Planet, drew the connection between colonial knowledge about the past and material violence in the present: He wrote, “This glorification of States Rights Doctrine – the right of succession, and the honoring of men who represented that cause – fosters in the Republic, the spirit of Rebellion and will ultimately result in the handing down to generations unborn a legacy of treason and blood” (Palmer and Wessler Reference Palmer and Wessler2018). In postcolonial critical realist terms, the colonial knowledge of white supremacy produced the materiality of statues. These, in turn, shaped people’s racialized, power-laden interactions with contemporary urban space as well as their understandings of history. Then, through emergence, statues that appeared untouchable and larger-than-life reinforced white supremacy in Richmond.
The Lee statue alone was administered and maintained by the Commonwealth of Virginia (the rest of Monument Avenue, including the other Confederate statues, was administered by the City of Richmond). Residents of Richmond also regarded the space as set apart: in interviews, new residents described strong memories of their first encounters with the statue and had often sought it out deliberately (Nyerges Reference Nyerges2021). Lifelong Richmonders, particularly Black Richmonders, reported deliberately avoiding Monument Avenue or feeling that it had, at best, no relevance to the contemporary city. Yet the enduring significance of the statue for some was violently visible: prior to June 2020, neo-Confederate activists would descend on the site each weekend, waving Confederate battle flags as they laid claim to the space. Well into the twenty-first century, Lee Circle was a site where colonial discourses of history were made material and visible, with implications for the way people remembered the past and understood their place in the city in the present.
In April 2017, after calling for the statues on Monument Avenue to be “recontextualized,” Richmond Mayor Levar Marcus Stoney announced the formation of the Monument Avenue Commission – a group of academic historians and community leaders who were tasked with researching the street’s history and consulting on its future. Civil rights organizations criticized Stoney for stopping short of removing the Confederate statues: Ana Edwards and Phil Wilayto of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice and Equality published an op-ed in the Richmond Free Press recounting the gradual transformation of the city into a “virtual shrine to the Lost Cause mythology.”
In June 2020, anti-racist protests converged on Lee Circle, reclaiming a white supremacist space and challenging the colonial knowledges that underpinned it. Thereafter, the space became a locus of the BLM protests that spread globally that summer. BLM protesters renamed the site in honor of Marcus-David Peters, a Black man who had been shot and killed by Richmond police officers. Demonstrators tagged the plinth, as well as the other Confederate statues, extensively with anti-racist and anti-police slogans. Two Richmond artists, Dustin Klein and Alex Criqui, projected images of George Floyd, alongside pro-BLM slogans, onto the statue itself. These nightly images became more intricate, celebrating African-American history, music, and art. The artists also changed the images in ways that reflected or shaped the atmosphere of demonstrations; for example, when they felt that the atmosphere was heated and that violence might break out, they projected a rainbow to signal harmony (Klein and Criqui Reference Klein and Criqui2021).
As the protests continued, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced that all of the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue would be removed. The other statues, indeed, were removed fairly quickly and were either placed in storage or donated to museums – which were tasked with making complex decisions about whether and how to display the statues publicly. Lee’s statue, however, became the subject of a protracted legal battle. This centered, among other issues, on language in the deed annexing Lee Circle to Virginia, which established the Commonwealth’s duty to “faithfully guard” and “affectionately protect” the statue. The legal battle concluded on September 2, 2021, when the Supreme Court of Virginia unanimously affirmed Governor Northam’s power to remove the statue.
Six days later, cranes assembled as a jubilant crowd gathered outside the fenced-in traffic circle. After wrapping the statue in a harness and painstakingly chipping away at the base, a member of the crew lifted his arms, encouraging the crowd to cheer as they counted down: “Three! Two! One!” Then the crane lifted the statue neatly from the plinth as the crowd sang “Hey, hey, hey, goodbye” and chanted “Black lives matter!” and “Whose streets? Our streets!” The statue was sliced in half at the torso, and the two pieces were moved discreetly into storage. They were eventually handed to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, whose interim director, Marland Buckner, stated that the museum “takes very seriously the responsibility to manage these objects in ways that ensure their origins and purpose are never forgotten: That is the glorification of those who led the fight to enslave African Americans and destroy the Union” (Gershon Reference Gershon2022).
The fate of the plinth, which had become an anti-racist piece of public art, was met with greater ambivalence. While Governor Northam initially indicated that the empty plinth would remain, in December – after losing his reelection bid to a candidate who had expressed the desire to return Confederate statues to their plinths – he reversed course and ordered that it be dismantled. Within days, crews erected scaffolding around the plinth and removed it, block by block, before placing it in storage. Anti-racist activists who had witnessed the image of George Floyd projected onto the plinth or who had tagged it with anti-racist and anti-police graffiti expressed regret that removing the visual reminder of their movement was “erasing what we worked for” (Layne Reference Layne2021). The city’s subsequent decision to temporarily landscape Lee Circle with flowers has also drawn widespread criticism: The design includes no pedestrian paths, and the density of the flowers means the space cannot function as a public gathering place. At present, Lee Circle, the former center of white supremacy in Richmond, is a sparsely planted, deliberately apolitical traffic circle.
While there have been discussions of what will replace the statues on Monument Avenue, no permanent decision has been made. Suggestions include large fountains with a nightly sound and light show (Bryan Reference Bryan2021), statues of Black Richmonders (a statue of tennis player Arthur Ashe was erected in 1996 and is currently the only statue still standing on Monument Avenue), or contemporary artistic interventions. Supporters of the final option point to Rumors of War, a towering equestrian statue by Kehinde Wiley depicting a young, Black man with dreadlocks, ripped jeans, and Nike high tops. It stands adjacent to the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The case of Robert E. Lee in Richmond illustrates the violence of erecting and maintaining Confederate statues in public space and, more fundamentally, the violence of a colonial narrative of history that depicts them as “heroes.” Equally, it reveals that challenging Confederate statues and the narratives that underlie them are a reclamation of marginalized and erased histories of anti-racist cultural activism. The removal of the statue signaled that the dominant narrative of history had changed, displacing Lee from his symbolic pedestal. This change, however, is incomplete: The “Reimagining Monument Avenue” project has been beset by delays and disagreements, which have persisted into the term of a new mayor and governor. In September 2023, the city completed a landscaping project and removed the fencing surrounding the circle; that landscaping, however, is temporary, and discussions about the future of the space will continue in the coming months and years. The messy, nonlinear contestation of history seems likely to continue.
Case study 2: Joséphine de Beauharnais in Fort-de-France
In Martinique, a Caribbean island and French overseas department, the erection and contestation of statues are bound up with imperial history, ongoing colonialism, and Caribbean history. While statues made colonial discourses material, generations of cultural activists, artists, and anti-colonial policymakers have altered the appearance of statues and, through emergence, the discourses underpinning them. The trajectory of one such statue reveals the many possibilities of contestation as well as the limitations of engaging with power-laden urban space.
In 1854, under Louis-Napoléon, the state commissioned a statue of the emperor’s aunt, Joséphine (first wife of Napoléon Bonaparte, born into a slaveholding family of elite planters in Martinique). The timing was not accidental: It followed the advent of the Second Empire, which sought to repudiate the knowledges and memories of the radical, tumultuous Second Republic that had preceded it. Slavery was central to this repudiation: Napoléon I had reimposed slavery in the French overseas territories after its initial, formal abolition.Footnote 2 Three decades later, the Second Republic had abolished slavery definitively. It was thus within the context of recent abolition that three statues of Joséphine – two in the vicinity of Paris and one in Martinique – were commissioned.
Imperial monument-building made material the authority of the Second Empire. In a reflection of colonial hierarchies, the construction of the statue was overseen by a commission based in Paris, which corresponded regularly with the Governor of Martinique (Sago Reference Sago2019). It was funded largely through private donations by elite Martinican planters, but the funding shortfall was covered by taxing Martinique’s predominantly Black population (Brown Reference Brown2006). The statue was sculpted from white marble, deliberately signifying the whiteness of Joséphine and the prestige of the French Empire. It stood on a marble pedestal atop a square, granite, five-meter-high plinth surrounded by an ornate grille with candelabras on either side. Eight royal palms were planted on the periphery, drawing attention to the impressive statue at the center. The symbolism was unmistakable: A white empress and slaveholder towered over the Black population of the island (Brown Reference Brown2006). The statue was inaugurated on August 29, 1859, in a prominent place in the center of the capital’s iconic park, La Savane. To celebrate, the colony hosted a three-day festival, with the governors of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Lucia and dignitaries from British and Danish Caribbean colonies in attendance. Highlights included a ball and a grand banquet. At the same time, a public party took place in La Savane, as well as an exhibition of Creole products.
Joséphine’s statue was widely perceived as a proclamation of the authority of a colonial discourse that made sense of history in a particular way and continued to do so well after the fall of the Second Empire and its successors. In 1946, Martinique became an overseas department, which formally ended the colonial era but signaled the continuation of an acutely unequal relationship with metropolitan France. The historical narrative that predominated was of French beneficence and Martinican gratitude: white French abolitionists had ended slavery, and white French politicians now extended the rights and privileges of citizenship to the descendants of enslaved people. This narrative was embodied by the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, whose statues proliferated in public space (Solbiac Reference Solbiac2020).
The formal decolonization of the French Empire in the 1960s brought widespread debates about the political and cultural future of Martinique. Anti-colonial activists expressed solidarity with colonized people worldwide and drew from pan-Caribbean, Black nationalist, and Tricontinental knowledges. In interviews, elder activists pointed to the role of transnational movements in radicalizing Martinican cultural activism (Valère Reference Valère2025). As colonial discourses were contested openly, so, too, was the statue of Joséphine. Consequently, in 1974, Aimé Césaire, Mayor of Fort-de-France, acquiesced to public opinion and moved the statue of Joséphine to a less prominent site within La Savane. In 1991, a group of anti-racist activists decapitated the statue and smeared red paint on the base of the neck. The decapitated statue took on a horrifying, haunted character whose effects were all the more significant because it remained visible in public space (McCusker Reference McCusker2025). Césaire, as mayor, decided not to replace the head. Instead, he institutionalized the altered statue by listing it as a national monument. In so doing, Césaire endorsed the contestation of colonial discourses that the decapitated statue represented. The red paint was reapplied regularly for the next 30 years, such that it continued to resemble blood. The decapitated and paint-spattered statue became, for many, an anti-racist symbol. For others, it remained a symbol of the endurance of colonialism. Each interaction with the statue laid claim to historical subjectivity within a power-laden context – perhaps most visibly in 2012, when the white French performance artist Sarah Trouche painted her naked body with roucou oil and publicly flogged the statue 33 times. As Curtius (Reference Curtius, Achille, Forsdick and Moudileno2020) writes, Trouche’s performance was an “act of memory” that both derecognized Joséphine and invited spectators to reclaim their historical subjectivity by interacting with the statue.
At the same time, Martinican cultural politics became increasingly bound up with global social movements. As Elisabeth Landi (Reference Landi2025), a historian and former elected official in Fort-de-France, explained: “We live in a global time … And we live through events that happen in every country in the world at the same time. And so all the actions that were taken to decolonize museums, decolonize cities, to affirm other forms of expression, all of that is well known.”
In 2020, the Mayor of Fort-de-France, Didier Laguerre, convened the Commission Mémoires et Transmissions to review the city’s contested heritage and set policy recommendations. The commission was composed of a loose group of thirty elected officials, academics, artists, activists, and private citizens, chaired by community historian and PhD candidate Mélody Moutamalle. Their mandate included the possibility of removing statues and renaming streets, as well as the development of pedagogical resources and, in the longer term, the establishment of a new site of memory dedicated to “our attachment to Africa and the various waves of immigration in Martinique” (Commission 2020, my translation). At their first meeting on July 20, 2020, the commission discussed the statue of Joséphine, which – unlike the nearby statue of French colonizer Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc – was slated to remain in place.
Young activists, however, rejected the commission’s plan. On July 16–17, 2020, during clashes between police and protesters, activists surrounded the statue with dried palm fronds and set fire to it. The statue remained intact. Days later, the group RVN issued an ultimatum to the city, calling on the mayor to remove the statue by July 26. If the city failed to do so, the activists would bring it down. On July 24, Mayor Laguerre rejected the ultimatum. Thus, two days later, a group of young people, including Jay Asani and Alexane Ozier-Lafontaine, painted the words “Mort au colonialisme” on a concrete block next to the statue, smashed the pedestal with sledgehammers, pulled down the statue with ropes, covered the rubble in dried palm fronds, and set fire to it.
Following the toppling of Joséphine and (on the same day) Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc, far-right politician Marine Le Pen tweeted that President Macron had promised no statue would be removed in France. Le Pen (Reference Le Pen2020) tweeted: “So the President lied, he will let our history and our heritage be dismantled by violent minorities” (my translation). Le Pen, like her centrist counterparts, condemned racialized and colonized subjects as unrepresentative of – and, indeed, irrelevant to – French national history. In so doing, these politicians denied the subjectivity of these actors and of the generations that had preceded them. Omitted from the politicians’ statements was any recognition that imposing a singular, colonial narrative of history – and erasing counternarratives – had been an act of a culture war. As Christine Aliker (Reference Aliker2025), an elected official in the town of Schoelcher, noted, “We’re very complicated people in Martinique. Has our relationship [with history] changed? I think people are becoming increasingly conscious of our origins … Now, on a daily basis, we need to bring that to the forefront and demonstrate that finally, we can think about it.” The counternarratives that had decapitated and, 30 years later, toppled the statue were not singular: while some elder activists applauded the younger generation for “finishing the job” (Ferdinand Reference Ferdinand2021), others claimed that they had erased an earlier act of resistance and overwritten the complex history of colonialism in the Caribbean (Pierrot Reference Pierrot2021). Five years later, all that remains of Joséphine’s statue is the crumbled, graffitied base of its plinth. The histories that recall Joséphine de Beauharnais and the people her family enslaved, however, remain multiple. The movement that brought down the statue continues to advocate for environmental justice, highlighting the continuity between the plantation system, commercial farming, and the use of harmful pesticides. Several RVN activists were only exonerated of criminal charges for their role in the events of 2020 five years later. The future of the emptied plinth, too, is uncertain: a 2021 plan to erect statues of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire in place of Joséphine de Beauharnais and Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc received initial enthusiasm from the municipal government before being quietly abandoned. The community permaculture planter atop the plinth is also gone, following an act of arson in June 2021. In its place, weeds have begun to take over the plinth, and activists intermittently spray it with fresh graffiti. In Fort-de-France, cultural activism has unsettled colonial discourses. But multivocal anti-colonial movements still struggle to occupy space in Martinican society.
Discussion and conclusion
The statues of Robert E. Lee and Joséphine de Beauharnais were erected in the thick of social change that threatened to undermine colonial narratives of history. Amid social upheaval, erecting the statues was a proclamation of ownership over space and an exclusive claim to historical subjectivity. By setting their memories of the past in stone, the elite actors who constructed the statues sought to delegitimize counter-memories from below – in particular, the memories of enslaved people and their descendants. By extension, erecting the statues proclaimed that people who did not share in their memories of the past had no place in the public sphere in the present. The statues on Monument Avenue, in the geographic center of Richmond, served as a warning to the Black residents of Jackson Ward that the city remained the heartland of white supremacy. Similarly, Joséphine’s prominent placement in La Savane proclaimed to the Black majority in Fort-de-France that Martinique remained fundamentally colonial and that the racial hierarchies of plantations remained in force. In both cases, the statues were not objective, didactic texts about historical figures. Rather, they were highly politicized sites of propaganda that forcefully imposed the historical subjectivity of the elite while denying the experiences, memories, and very humanity of racialized and colonial subjects. They were, in short, shots fired in a culture war.
Yet the enduring lesson of these nineteenth-century culture wars is that the forceful imposition of hegemonic knowledges is never complete. Rather, contesting statues and (by extension) colonial knowledges is a tradition nearly as long as erecting statues. This transnational, anti-colonial tradition of resistance refutes both universalism and analytic bifurcation and holds implications for contemporary “culture wars”: contesting statues is not a new and presentist crisis but a response to a long-standing crisis of historical subjectivity.
As Robert E. Lee and Joséphine de Beauharnais fell, those who charged activists with “erasing history” sought, once again, to appeal to a singular, universal narrative of past and present that was derived from colonial knowledges. Yet appealing to this narrative was, itself, an act of erasure: defending the historical subjects of those statues as untouchable “heroes” erased their participation in systems of oppression, the contestation of those figures and their statues across time, and the historical subjectivity of people who had opposed them. Toppling statues is a multivocal, unsettling decolonial project that changes the material reality of a city, challenges the authority of colonial discourses, and answers a long-standing historical crisis.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Veda Kim and Yasemin Bavbek for their encouragement throughout the writing process. I would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.
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