Unresolved Archives - Contested Histories

Victor Schœlcher Statues in Fort-de-France and Schœlcher

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In May 2020, two statues of French administrator Victor Schoelcher were destroyed in Martinique by members of the local youth group Ligue de Défense Noire Africaine (LDNA/Black African Defence League). Despite being a celebrated figure for his role in abolishing slavery in the French colonies, Schoelcher’s legacy has come under increased contestation over the last decade. However, the toppling of these statues disguises a broader conversation that transcends the individual figure of Schoelcher, including enduring colonial legacies and the very telling of Martinique’s national history. This case study examines the reasons that motivated the attack on Shoelcher’s statues and the political authority’s response to these actions. It underscores the degree to which these events reflect conflicting top-down and bottom-up interpretations of Martinique’s national history, symbols, and memory.

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Victims of Political Repression Monument in Tayshet

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In the summer of 2020, a monument to the victims of Stalinist political repression was unveiled in the city of Tayshet in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. On July 4, 2020, the monument was vandalised and defaced, making the inscription illegible. During Soviet rule, the Gulag camp Taishetlag was located near the city, making Tayshet a stop which all prisoners made on their journey to the Gulag. In the twenty-first century, President Vladimir Putin’s reconstruction of Stalin’s figure and Soviet patriotism provoked the emergence of many new monuments to Stalin and the vandalism of those commemorating victims. Monuments remembering the victims of the Stalinist era provide a physical and spatial rebuttal to heroic memories of Stalinism. This case analyses the ongoing clash between the unofficial rehabilitation of Stalin and the commemoration of victims of the Soviet system of repression, taking the monument in Tayshet as an example.

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Statue of Unity in Gujarat

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0000

On Vallabhai Jhaverbhai Patel’s 143rd birthday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled India’s tribute to him in the form of the world’s tallest statue. Standing at 182 metres, the Statue of Unity is almost double the height of the Statue of Liberty. It was revealed with military celebration and Hindu inaugural rites. Modi’s public address named the monument as a symbol of his ruling party’s ideology – ‘one nation, one creed’. Far from unifying the country, the statue has fractured the nation with various criticisms of the project. This case will explore the political agenda behind its creation as well as the economic and social ramifications at the tribal, state, and national levels.

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Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, holds the dichotomous and, at times, violent
legacy of race in the American South. It memorialises Edmund Pettus, a leader of the White
supremacist Ku Klux Klan, and it was a site of pivotal Civil Rights Movement protests in the 1960s.
Two petitions to rename the bridge and shed the White supremacist allusion have gained visibility
in the US; however, neither the 2015 nor the 2020 petition led to the legal change in the name of
the bridge. The 2020 petition was primarily sparked by the death of Representative John Lewis, a
prominent Civil Rights Movement organiser who protested on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the
1960s. This 2020 petition inspired a renaming resolution that saw initial success in the Alabama
Legislature, but the resolution eventually faltered, allowing the Edmund Pettus Bridge’s name to
persevere.

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Martyrs of War Memorial in Algiers

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In 2020, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin sparked controversy during his visit to Algeria after posting a video on Twitter attending a memorial at the Monument of the Martyr (makam el-chahid) in Algiers. The monument was inaugurated in 1982 to mark the 20th anniversary of Algerian independence from France and is designed to commemorate the Algerian lives lost in the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). During the same visit, Darmanin also paid tribute to the French soldiers at the Saint-Eugene cemetery in Bologhine. Only the tribute at the former site, however, caused controversy. The memorial elicited a wave of response and criticism on social media, in the press, and from public fi gures, particularly from the French right. This case focuses on an example of transnational contestation, as the event provoked similarly negative reactions in France and Algeria.

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Holocaust Memorial in Kavala

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The erection of a memorial to the 1,484 Jewish residents of Kavala killed during the Holocaust provoked a dispute between Jewish advocates and the City Council, grounded in anti-Semitic rhetoric. The memorial’s unveiling was delayed amidst calls to remove the Star of David from its face, prompting criticism from the international community. Upon its belated unveiling on June 7, 2015, Deputy Minister Panagiotis Sgourdis drew comparisons between the atrocities of World War II and the current situation in Palestine. Since then, the memorial has been vandalised thrice. This case study explores how the attempts to commemorate Kavala’s Jewish victims of the Holocaust caused manifestations of long-rooted anti-Semitism in Greece, triggering the reflexes of the local community.

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National Democratic Party’s Headquarters in Cairo

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

During the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the Headquarters of then-President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party were set on fire. While initially, the building was not intended as a monument, it acquired intense symbolic significance in the aftermath of the revolution. Consequently, the fate of the building in the post-revolutionary era became deeply divisive over whether it should be maintained or removed in its entirety. At present, it remains as an empty lot fenced off from the public. This case study explores the complexity of reinterpretation of sites in the aftermath of mass societal and political upheaval.

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Skenderbeu Monument in Skopje

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The Skopje 2014 project, whose objective was to create a ‘homogenised space’ that showcased Macedonian history and culture, was decisive for installing the Sekenderbeu monument. Even though the monument was planned to promote unity between the different ethnicities of the country, the top-down approach and the narrative created remain contested. This case analyses the top-down approach taken, and more generally, the Skopje 2014 project, and how instead of uniting, it provoked further tensions between the ethnic Albanian and Macedonian.

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King Gustav III Statue in Stockholm

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In June 2020 the chairman of Afrosvenskarnas riksförbund (the Afro-Swedish National Federation) called for the removal of a statue of Gustav III, the king who brought Sweden into the transatlantic slave trade and made Sweden a colonising power through his purchase of the Caribbean island of Saint-Barthelémy in 1784. However, politicians and journalists in Sweden were largely against the removal of statues, citing either the supposedly iconoclastic nature of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement or the importance of resisting ‘historical revisionism’. Some suggested the importance of preserving and presenting all sides of history, including aspects which were more difficult to address. This case study highlights the unique nature of Swedish debates on its colonial past and concepts of Swedish ‘white innocence’, as well as the resistance to the removal of contested statues in Sweden’s capital.

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Rhodes Statue at Oriel College in Oxford, England

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 10:12:54 +0000

In 2015, the student organisation Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford was established to protest against the statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College. The initial two-year campaign led to promises from Oriel to contextualise the monument, which ultimately went unfulfilled. The campaign was reignited in June 2020 following the death of George Floyd, and in response, Oriel College announced its desire to remove the statue. However, the introduction by the Government of a ‘retain and explain’ policy made this impossible. Oriel College’s decision to contextualise the statute with a small ‘information sign’ has been dismissed as ‘woefully inadequate’ by activists.

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