Confederate monuments and the problem of forgetting

Abstract

Those advocating the removal of US Confederate monuments have generally relied on the claim that because the ideas these monuments represent (i.e. White supremacy) have no legitimate place in political discourse, the monuments should be removed from public space. While we share this normative position, experiences while teaching our interdisciplinary undergraduate course on Memory, Place, and Power forced us to interrogate our reflexive desire to ‘take ’em down’. We learned that as scholars and practitioners, we must not only better explain and defend the nature of the ‘forgetting’ that happens when we remove Confederate monuments but also put our discussion of their fate into a broader international context, one that embraces a range of alternatives beyond the stark choice of removal versus retention.