Monumental empowerment: The vandalism of public mnemonic objects

Abstract

This article develops a novel approach for defending the vandalism of ‘tainted’ monuments by appealing to democratic process. Through the framework of symbolic power, and with a focus on deliberative processes of ‘collective authorization’, the article makes three central claims. First, I argue that public mnemonic objects that are improperly authorized result in the symbolic powerlessness of those excluded. Second, I argue that this powerlessness survives when collectives fail to re-authorize their mnemonic objects. As such, I redefine ‘tainted’ commemorations with reference to procedure and not merely problematic content. Third, I defend the vandalism of tainted commemorations as assertions of symbolic empowerment, or full participation in symbolic design, for groups facing historical and ongoing marginalization. Together, these arguments explore how the failure of narrow and/or top-down processes of monument authorization and their objectification in the memory landscape redirect unfulfilled democratic participation to the physical, built realm.

Introduction

The concept of vandalism emerged in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, referencing the Vandals’ fifth-century sack of Rome to describe the destruction of public objects during the Reign of Terror (Doss, 2016: 403). Following the French Revolution, competing visions for how to handle monuments and statues of the Ancien Régime existed. While some wanted to destroy them, others advocated retaining them to serve a historical and educative purpose (Idzerda, 1954: 13–14). These competing perspectives mirror contemporary debates between so-called ‘activists’ favoring the removal of outdated commemorations and ‘preservationists’ who suggest incorporating them into our continuing public consciousness (Lim, 2020a: 194). In the 1790s, the new French regime made efforts to recognize both sides of this debate, establishing the Commission of Monuments to identify objects worth preserving while also authorizing the destruction of all statues ‘erected in honor of despotism’ or containing ‘traces of feudalism’ (Idzerda, 1954: 16). The Commission, however, struggled to keep pace with the destruction of monuments by revolutionaries, and the term vandalisme was coined after the fall of Robespierre as an accusation about the destruction of cultural objects (Marschall, 2017: 206). But, if some historical and contemporary instances of monument vandalism seem normatively satisfying, what is the best way to defend them? This article presents a new approach for understanding and defending the vandalism of ‘tainted’ public mnemonic objects, appealing to the democratic process rather than merely the content of targeted objects.

Vandalism is the ‘deliberate destruction or damage of property’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 1916). For the purposes of this article, the relevant sub-category of vandalism targets the intersection of what Kukla (2022) calls ‘public artifacts’ and what Nora (1989: 7) famously terms ‘lieux de mémoire’. Kukla (2022: 233) notes that many artifacts are ‘part of the public landscape—including monuments, memorials, murals, and many viewing towers, arches, gardens, public sculptures, and buildings’. These artifacts are not only physically located in public spaces but also public in the sense that they purport to speak on behalf of a certain collective. Nora’s (1989: 19) lieux de mémoire translates to ‘sites of memory’ which are material but also symbolic and functional. At lieux de mémoire including ‘museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, [and] fraternal orders’, ‘memory crystallizes and secretes itself’ (Nora, 1989: 7 and 12). At the overlap of these two frameworks lie public mnemonic objects—material sites of memory which are part of the public landscape and thus purport to speak on a public’s interpretation of the past. Material sites that lack a clear ‘intention to remember’ (many everyday architectures including gardens, buildings, towers, etc.) (Nora, 1989: 19), personal mnemonic items (such as journals of deceased family members), and spaces and places that are difficult or require special permission to access (including many archives) fall outside this category. By virtue of their location, public mnemonic objects including statues, memorials, and monuments are exposed to the variable circumstances of public places and audiences. They are therefore vulnerable to vandalism in a variety of forms, including paint splashing and graffiti, decapitating or otherwise altering depicted figures, and toppling (Doss, 2016: 404). This vandalism is typically associated with ‘violence, unlawfulness, disrespect, disobedience, and uncivilized behavior’ (Marschall, 2017: 204), stigmatized in ways which prevent it from being understood as playing a cultural or political role (Lim, 2020b).

However, the past decade has seen a growing questioning of this orientation in the face of heightened tensions surrounding ‘tainted’ commemorations (Abrahams, 2023; Lai, 2020; Lim, 2020a, 2020b) which appear outdated, offensive, or unrepresentative of community values. Both popular debate and academic work have begun to challenge the understanding of vandalism as only destructive, exploring whether vandalism of public mnemonic objects can have a productive cultural or political function and how vandalism relates to debates about mnemonic object removal, relocation, or recontextualization. Despite this growing interest, only two frameworks for conceptualizing and defending this vandalism have emerged: a more dominant framework about counter-speech that challenges harmful commemorations (Bell, 2022; Lai, 2020; Schulz, 2019) and another focused on improving epistemic accuracy (Abrahams, 2023; Kukla, 2022). In this article, I propose an alternative based in deliberative democratic theory, defending vandalism in response to tainted monumental forms produced through exclusionary and undemocratic processes of ‘collective authorization’ (Drvar, 2005; Forest and Johnson, 2002; Kukla, 2022; Lim, 2020a). The argument is presented over four sections. In the first, I critique existing accounts of monument vandalism. In the second, I develop the concept of symbolic powerlessness to describe the status of those lacking meaningful participation in decision-making processes regarding commemoration. In the third, I describe how this powerlessness survives when communities fail to ‘re-authorize’ their mnemonic objects and provides the basis for defining ‘tainted’ commemorations. And finally, in the fourth section, I defend vandalizing tainted commemorations as a form of symbolic empowerment for excluded groups. Taken together, these claims form an argument about the failure of narrow, top-down, and/or exclusionary processes of collective authorization and their objectification in public mnemonic objects redirecting unfulfilled democratic participation to the physical, built realm.

The counter-speech approach

This section presents and critiques accounts of vandalism as counter-speech against problematic commemorations—which I term ‘content-based’ accounts. Scholars who frame vandalism as counter-speech normatively defend it by examining the content of the targeted object. When this content is deemed sufficiently harmful or offensive, they argue that the commemoration functions similarly to hate speech, targeting members of the community with force drawn from the authority of speaking in the name of the people. Lai (2020: 604), the most explicit proponent of this approach, argues that problematic symbols harm members of the community through the mechanism of derogatory pedestalling, wherein ‘by saluting, glorifying, or honoring an unjust oppressor or ideology, speakers indirectly rank their target(s) as inferior, convey hostility, or implicitly insult and assault their target(s)’. Schulz (2019) argues more narrowly that public commemorations harm when they degrade or alienate. Degrading commemorations are ‘expressive of an ideology that is both disrespectful and expressively connected to an existing and wrongful social hierarchy’ (Schulz, 2019: 167). A commemoration alienates when it is constitutive of a commemorative infrastructure that ‘denies sources of self-respect: that is, when it fails to assure all those who make up society of their shared equal status’ (Schulz, 2019: 167). Bell (2022: 778) argues that racist memorials are ‘wrong insofar as they express and exemplify a morally objectionable attitude of race-based contempt’. These authors cite examples including Confederate monuments and Cecil Rhodes statues as ‘tainted’.

Content-based accounts situate vandalism as an option for challenging and neutralizing the wrong that ‘tainted’ commemorations commit. While Schulz (2019: 184) encourages confronting alienating or degrading commemorations through open reckoning with the past and public processes of reconfiguring the memory landscape, Lai (2020: 608) emphasizes how ‘sympathizers of tainted symbols are not always willing to remove or even consider clarifying tainted symbols with plaques or counter-monuments’. In such cases, Lai (2020) argues that vandalism provides an effective form of counter-speech that challenges problematic content and neutralizes it immediately. Bell (2022) situates the defacement of problematic commemorations as an integral part of ‘dishonoring’ their racist subjects. He argues that removal ‘does not fully answer the ways in which these memorials wrong’ and defends defacement as ‘public expressions of contempt’ within an ‘apt dishonouring process’ (Bell, 2022: 778). While Bell (2022) situates defacement as an alternative to removal and Lai (2020) recommends defacement in cases where removal cannot be achieved, both conceptualize vandalism as a way to address harmful messages in the public memory landscape through counter-speech.

Content-based justifications for vandalism face a severe limitation, however, because they are too easily coopted by reactionary or conservative groups. Definitions of what constitutes a ‘tainted’ commemoration based on its content, especially when grounded in real-world practice, quickly slip into an analysis of what politics one does and does not prefer. This issue is most glaring in Lai’s (2020) account. Lai (2020: 603) cites many ways a commemoration can be tainted, including those that simply ‘harm’, ‘are symbolic of objectionable ideologies’, and ‘reinforce dubious moral commitments’. One can easily imagine these charges being referenced by, for example, white supremacist groups upset by a progressive commemoration in their communities. This is not an assessment of the merit of those claims but an acknowledgment of how content-based defenses are easily mobilized to justify cases of vandalism that do not seem normatively desirable. Schulz’s (2019) account of problematic commemorations avoids these problems more effectively by referencing wrongful social hierarchies within the definition of degradation. But his concept of alienation could be similarly harnessed by reactionary groups. Members of dominant groups may claim that attacks on their ‘heritage’ undermine their basis of self-respect and equal social standing, as has become more commonplace in recent years. For example, white Americans and South Africans have referenced being devalued in their communities as a justification for backlash (see Joseph, 2022 on accusations of history lessons making white children feel guilty).

This practical problem is symptomatic of a deeper theoretical issue present in these accounts: their difficulty avoiding charges of deciding what constitutes a tainted commemoration and acting in response undemocratically. As Lim (2020a) highlights, an important concern surrounding the vandalism of public commemorations relates to how these actions can be non-representative of broader values. He explains,

Suppose that a lone activist vandalizes a commemoration which she regards as tainted. She may genuinely be a marginal character with views that are not representative of the community as a whole, or even of a subset of it which includes the members of formerly oppressed groups (Lim, 2020a: 210).

Forest and Johnson (2019) extend this worry beyond lone vandal cases. Spontaneous destructions of monuments, on their account, avoid deliberative processes that involve the entire community. They write,

. . . protestors’ impromptu demolition of a Confederate monument in Durham, North Carolina [is] a normatively satisfying but problematic model for decisions over the symbolic landscape. Such spontaneous removals effectively grant any group or individual the right to erase lieux de mémoire from public space without democratic discussion or deliberation (Forest and Johnson, 2019: 129).

This larger issue renders Lim’s (2020a: 211) suggestion that vandals consult with oppressed groups insufficient for salvaging content-based defenses.

Forest and Johnson (2019) point to an important problem: when individuals and groups make unilateral judgments about which commemorations are tainted and choose how to respond based on the content of mnemonic objects, they act undemocratically. Lai (2020: 606–607) emphasizes that political symbols speak in the name of the people, which makes the presence of tainted commemorations especially problematic because harmful speech is normalized as the standard view. However, if political symbols speak in the name of the people, their modification must appeal to broad processes of democratic deliberation in which the people can collectively determine the values they wish to express. When decisions over taintedness are made without a reference to these processes, the vandalism of commemorations must be rejected on democratic grounds. While proponents of these accounts may bite this bullet, accepting the need for undemocratic vandalism in the face of harmful commemorations and a lack of venues for democratic deliberation on heritage—and such an argument is not entirely unpersuasive—this discussion suggests that a stronger justification would reference democratic process rather than relying solely on public mnemonic object content. While agonist theories of democracy (see Mouffe, 2000) might position monument vandalism as a form of active political contestation and thus a democratic good, these theories lack a proper explanation of why and when this contestation must be directed at the material of public mnemonic objects rather than pursued through other participatory methods. Deliberative democratic theory provides a more compelling account of why monuments become sites of democratic contestation and when vandalism of monument forms can be justified without generating an unending cycle of destruction at odds with the public funds invested in monuments and idea of durability central to memory politics.

It is worth noting another strand of research which approaches this topic through a lens on epistemic accuracy, wherein vandalism corrects untrustworthy historical testimony. This approach (Abrahams, 2023; Kukla, 2022) takes democratic process more seriously than counter-speech accounts. What differentiates them from the defense I will offer, however, is that they situate democratic process as a mere means toward the end of increasing the trustworthiness of public commemorations. Although not a purely epistemic argument, Abrahams (2023: 255–256) claims that the literature on problematic commemorations overlooks the role statues play in public history, offering reconstructions of past events that inform people of how and why something happened. Tainted commemorations are thus responsible for ‘bad history’ and are taken to be wrong ontically, with incorrect versions of the past creating and sustaining unjust identities (Abrahams, 2023: 260). In more squarely epistemological terms, Kukla (2022: 247) explains,

public artifacts may be imposed top-down on the landscape by official authorities, but once they are marked by members of the community, they come to testify to community dissent and conflict as well as to the views and emotions of a wider range of community members. This testimony to dissent may well be more accurate, and present a more nuanced view of history, than the original work.

While my account likely results in epistemic improvements by recommending broader community participation in symbolic design, this is not my central normative position. Epistemic accounts often obscure the goals of commemoration. Some public mnemonic objects depict figures without well-documented, written historical records, as is the case with Chief Tshwane, an African leader known through oral histories and monumentalized following South Africa’s formal exit from apartheid as a symbol of Black liberation (Marschall, 2017: 209; Fubah, 2020). White South Africans both vandalized the statue and resisted its construction using arguments that there is no definitive proof that Chief Tshwane existed (Mail and Guardian, 2006). London’s Mary Seacole statue, which celebrates the contributions of racialized immigrants to healthcare, was opposed by those who argued that Seacole was not a nurse but a healer and therefore should not be commemorated at a nursing school (Fleming, 2016). The statue was vandalized, and though no culprit was identified, one could claim attempts at increasing epistemic accuracy along these lines.

Symbolic powerlessness

The next three sections develop a novel approach for conceptualizing tainted public mnemonic objects and defending their vandalism through a focus on processes of ‘collective authorization’ and inequalities in symbolic power. In this section, I propose the concept of symbolic powerlessness to describe the situation of those without meaningful roles in processes for authorizing public mnemonic objects. Wustenberg (2023: 32) argues that ‘what we decide to set in stone, what we commemorate in our public spaces, matters for how we are governed and how our societies are constituted at a deeper level’. Public mnemonic objects are valuable for producing social trust and solidarity (Dembinska, 2010), forming communities and identities (Abrahams, 2023; Misztal, 2003; Nora, 1989) and legitimizing political projects, especially in times of uncertainty, transition, or upheaval (Kubik and Bernhard, 2014; Light and Young, 2015). As such, public mnemonic objects constitute significant stores of symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1990; Forest and Johnson, 2002). Bourdieu (1990: 118) defines symbolic capital as ‘the capital of honor and prestige’ and cites the close relationship between symbolic capital and earning profit, achieving or maintaining influence, and garnering legitimacy. Necessarily, then, symbolic capital in the form of public mnemonic objects emerges as significant political and cultural resources. Bourdieu references ‘symbolic forms of power’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 125) as relating to control over symbolic capital (Forest and Johnson, 2002). Those able to influence and design what a public mnemonic object looks like, what it says, and who it commemorates hold symbolic power.

Recognizing public artifacts as forms of speech, Kukla (2022: 237) argues that they constitute ‘collective material testimony’ only when the collective they speak on behalf of ‘authorizes [their] display and use as speech’. In other words, collective material testimony exists only when ‘there is a genuine process of collective authorization’ (Kukla, 2022: 237). They explain,

for the speech act to be a collective speech act . . . everyone in the collective must identify with that collective and have a legitimate role in participating or collaborating in its collective acts . . . Everyone must have the opportunity to have their voice represented . . . (Kukla, 2022: 237).

Therefore, collective authorization processes are best understood as substantively equal and inclusive public deliberations among citizens, either directly or through delegation to representatives. While the ‘collective’, and who counts as its members, in relation to a public mnemonic object is not always immediately clear (Müller, 2021), deliberations among all those who claim a relevant connection can address this question. More crucially, supplementing Kukla’s (2022) argument with the Bordieusian vocabulary reveals that true processes of collective authorization entail the democratic sharing of symbolic power. Where everyone has a role to play in authorizing a public mnemonic object, all members of the community possess a degree of symbolic power. But true collective authorization does not always take place (Kukla, 2022: 245). States, artists, corporations, dominant cultural groups, and other social authorities wield disproportionate influence during processes of authorization and therefore possess greater symbolic power than ordinary citizens and marginalized communities. Authorization processes for public mnemonic objects are often characterized by a ‘democratic deficit’ (Markovits, 2005) that denies certain citizens important cultural, social, and political resources.

Analyzing processes of collective authorization reveals these deficits and points to citizens who lack symbolic power. I argue that undemocratic and/or exclusionary processes of collective authorization amount to a symbolic powerlessness of those without meaningful participatory roles. Symbolic powerlessness does not result from voluntary failure to participate in authorization processes nor disagreement with the outcomes of these processes (Kukla, 2022). Rather, it stems from an inability to participate in these processes on equal terms with others or at all. It is worth noting that collective authorization processes do not necessarily have to take a majoritarian form that situates the individual citizen as the relevant political unit for equality. For example, cases including Indigenous communities that are numerically small and easily overridden in settler majoritarian democracy may require other institutional forms and power-sharing innovations. Furthermore, while oppressed identity groups are important cases of symbolic powerlessness, a procedural analysis may reveal a variety of other individuals and groups subject to exclusion in different cases, such as university students in the case of campus commemorations and even ‘the people’ as a whole under regimes that impose state designs onto the public landscape (including but not limited to authoritarian regimes; see Birman, 2025). Finally, while democratic procedure must be guided by substantive principles of justice—deliberative politics takes seriously only those reasons that respect others as equal citizens, and thus, proposals for mnemonic forms must not deny this equal standing—it is not reducible to these principles. This point will be picked up in the next section through a discussion of monument forms without obviously problematic content. But first, an analysis of authorization processes for mnemonic forms popular in the literature on vandalism clarifies the production of symbolic powerlessness.

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign, a much-discussed example (Gregory, 2021; Marschall, 2017), is yet to be described through a focus on the democratic process. The Cecil Rhodes statue was unveiled at the University of Cape Town in 1934, funded by the Rhodes National South African Committee and commissioned by then governor general, The Earl of Clarendon (Shepherd, 2022). South Africa at the time was formally a dominion within the British Empire, and the governor general represented the British monarch and possessed certain symbolic powers. Although not yet under official apartheid rule, Black South Africans were widely disenfranchised around 1934 due to discriminatory property and education voting qualifications, and just 2 years later, Black South Africans would be placed on a separate voters’ roll for an assembly with little power (Fraser, n.d.). As such, its authorization process was heavily exclusionary toward Black South Africans. In addition, decisions made over campus spaces at the University of Cape Town have historically been, and are still largely, made by the university’s council. Today, this council has three student representatives (drawn from the SRC, or Students’ Representative Council). The university accepted its first group of Black students in the 1920s and admits that these numbers were kept extremely low until the 1980s (University of Cape Town, n.d.). As Luescher (2009: 418) explains, ‘Glen Goosen’s SRC (1985/86) had been the first to take black students’ concerns seriously and include their issues on the agenda’. As such, even if SRC representatives sat on the university’s council in the 1930s, Black students were substantively excluded from the organization, and thus from participation in the Rhodes statue’s authorization. As a result, the authorization of the Cecil Rhodes statue rendered Black South Africans, and Black students at the University of Cape Town in particular, substantially symbolically powerless.

Virginia’s Robert E. Lee statue was completed in 1890 but with an authorization process beginning following Lee’s death in 1870. Several organizations campaigned for the monument’s construction, including former Confederate soldiers, the Lee Monument Association, and the Ladies’ Lee Monument Association. The project was ultimately approved by the Virginia State Board, composed of the governor, state auditor, and treasurer (United States Department of the Interior National Park Service, 2006: 8). As Foster (1988: 55–56) explains, the first coalitions campaigning for Lee’s memorialization were composed mostly of Confederate leaders and upper-class Southerners hoping to ‘justify their own conduct by ardently defending the actions of the South’ following their defeat in the Civil War. While working-class Southerners later mobilized around the statue, and though the campaign’s focus shifted from rationalizing defeat to ‘comradeship’ in the 1880s, white Southerners always led the charge (Foster, 1988: 93–94). At the time, Black Southerners were significantly excluded from participation in civil society following the 1883 overturn of the 1875 Civil Rights Act, early institutionalization of Jim Crow legislation, and frequent intimidation, marginalization, and violence throughout the entire period of the monument’s authorization. Although the statue was the result of a bottom-up push for commemoration, Black Americans lacked the ability to oppose such an effort (see Wustenberg, 2023 on the limits of civic democracy).

A final set of examples considers the position of Indigenous peoples in processes of authorization. A statue of Juan de Oñate—a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador—stood in Alcalde, New Mexico, from 1994 until 2020. The statue was constructed to celebrate the region’s Hispanic heritage, but groups indigenous to the area were not consulted in the process of authorizing the commemoration to be placed on public land home to Pueblo villages. A representative from an Indigenous rights group explained to journalists that ‘this is Pueblo land. And so, the people you should be listening to, first and foremost, when it comes to the history of colonization are the native people whose land you’re occupying’ (Burnett, 2020). Acoma leaders ‘hope that the mayor and others at the city will take a careful look at a direct dialogue with tribes’ (Burnett, 2020). In this case of contested heritage, local governments and Spanish Americans have imposed symbols on Indigenous populations rather than granting them substantive power within processes of collective authorization. Similar cases of Indigenous exclusion are common throughout the so-called ‘Anglosphere’. For example, the John MacDonald monument in Montréal was unveiled in 1895, when, under the Indian Act, First Nations men and women were eligible to vote only by giving up their Indian status and thus substantively excluded from all politics, including municipal.

Re-authorization and tainted commemorations

In this section, I describe how symbolic powerlessness survives in the physical memory landscape through failure to periodically re-authorize public mnemonic objects. Accordingly, I redefine ‘tainted’ commemorations as closely related to yet meaningfully distinct from ‘problematic’ ones. One might respond to the idea of symbolic powerlessness by saying—yes, those individuals and groups were excluded from commemorative decisions, but in the case of historical monuments, no members of contemporary communities had any say over the initial commemoration. So, is everyone alive now symbolically powerless? This concern can be addressed by connecting historical powerlessness to contemporary patterns through the idea of public mnemonic object ‘re-authorization’. Fox (2023) argues that, as a mechanism for improving democratic control over public spaces, all public monuments should have predetermined dates for removal. This argument is compelling, but one need not jump straight to removal. A more persuasive claim is that public mnemonic objects should be periodically re-authorized by their relevant publics through deliberative democratic processes, especially, but not only, following major transitions or transformations. Publics may choose to retain existing forms, remove or relocate them, or supplement them with counter-monuments, contextualization, or new rituals.

However, governments and heritage organizations typically fail to re-open processes of collective authorization for public mnemonic objects. In most cases, re-authorizations occur only once catalyzed by acts of vandalism, as was the case following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests (which saw the vandalism and subsequent removal of Richmond’s Robert E. Lee statue and Montréal’s John MacDonald statue). The City of Montréal only established an ad hoc committee to ‘reflect on the future of the [John MacDonald] monument’ following its decapitation by protestors in 2020 (Art Public Montreal, 2025). The University of Cape Town failed to engage with student demands to remove the Cecil Rhodes statue in the 1970s, and more strikingly, it did not hold a thorough process of re-authorization following the formal end of apartheid. A focus on re-authorization also extends our view beyond public mnemonic objects with obviously problematic content and toward a better understanding of monumental politics more generally. For instance, Mexico City’s Angel of Independence monument was completed in 1910, under President Porfirio Díaz’s authoritarian rule and before women gained the right to vote (Trillo, 1996; Miller, n.d.). Constructed as part of centennial celebrations of Mexican independence, it is generally considered a symbol of Mexican freedom and has a typical column form. However, it has been repeatedly vandalized during protests, most famously by feminist protesters in 2019. The monument was never publicly re-authorized following revolution in 1911 and the enfranchisement of women in 1953, and authorities have restored it following damage in protests despite public outcry (Islas Weinstein, 2024). A focus on re-authorization following major transitions might also improve the study of the extensively discussed monumental forms of Eastern Europe and Central Asia constructed before 1989 (Light and Young, 2015), including the repeatedly vandalized Bulgarian Monument to the Soviet Army, whose local authorities never took action to realize the removal decision of a (albeit narrow) re-authorization by Sofia city councilmembers in 1993 (Todorov, 2023).

In the rare cases where re-authorizations occur without pressure from acts of vandalism, historically powerless groups face notable obstacles to equal standing. These barriers may include a lack of adequate representation in elective and non-elective institutions and trouble being taken seriously by others in their capacity as knowers, known as ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker, 2007). Pantazatos (2017: 377) argues that institutions of cultural heritage are plagued with epistemic injustice, preventing certain participants from ‘shaping the future of heritage’. Descendants of the marginalized, unlike descendants of their oppressors, may continue to be underrepresented in decision-making bodies and may struggle to have their historical testimony taken seriously by members of the dominant group. Racialized epistemic injustices remain prevalent (Mills, 2007; Puddifoot, 2017), women are sometimes dismissed as dramatic or underqualified, college students are often labeled radical and immature, and Indigenous peoples may be denied the status of knowledge-bearers on the past (Tsosie, 2017). Legacies of historical powerlessness often connect to ongoing powerlessness in processes of collectively re-authorizing public mnemonic objects, when they do exist. As such, the presence of counter-monuments (Stevens et al., 2012) or commemorative counter-vigilance does not, by itself, signal re-authorization. While these things represent community efforts to grapple with the past, they only constitute re-authorization when they result from processes that are broadly inclusive, make special efforts to empower previously marginalized communities on the institutional level, and consider a range of options for dealing with commemorations, including removal. Thus, symbolic powerlessness does not merely denote the condition of lacking power over a public mnemonic object’s initial authorization. It entails this fact and (a) a lack of available processes for collective re-authorization and/or (b) continuing barriers to full participation in re-authorization.

Symbolic powerlessness understood in this way provides a novel basis for conceptualizing ‘tainted’ commemorations. Improperly authorized public mnemonic objects, when constructed into object form in the public sphere, generate a lasting reification of powerlessness. Existing accounts use the terms ‘tainted’ and ‘problematic’ interchangeably to describe monuments that make offensive speech (Bell, 2022; Lai, 2020; Schulz, 2019). In contrast, I distinguish the two and link taintedness to democratic deficits (Markovits, 2005) in authorization processes. I therefore redefine ‘tainted’ commemorations as those that give object form to legacies of symbolic powerlessness regardless of whether their physical appearance is clearly problematic. This does not however entail severing the linkages between procedural failures and harmful content, as done by those who situate content and procedural problems as two ‘different’ ways to define taintedness (Lim, 2020a: 188–189; Lim and Lai, 2024). In many cases, deficits from authorization processes visibly mark inequality within the memory landscape through the production of offensive commemorations because dominant groups use these processes and objects to legitimate domination (Espliego, 2024; O’Brien Davis, 2022). Furthermore, a procedural explanation for problematic content provides a more concrete starting point for deciding what to do with out-of-date or offensive commemorations. Content-based accounts typically suggest removal, but many commentators are willing to admit problematic content while also being committed to historical preservation (Frick, 2024: 95–96; Lim, 2020a: 194). Defining taintedness with reference to democratic process encourages the development of venues for re-authorizing commemorations, both before they become objects of public debate and following instances of vandalism.

The University of Cape Town’s Cecil Rhodes statue was indeed tainted (and problematic) (Marschall, 2017; Schulz, 2019). But this taintedness resulted from its authorization by colonial-era authorities, the historical exclusion of Black students on the University of Cape Town campus, and the striking failure to re-authorize after major moments of transition. Discussions of the Robert E. Lee statue must not only reference its chosen subject but contextualize the persecution and substantive exclusion of Black Americans at the time of its construction and the lack of re-authorization processes for built environment forms since. The same can be said of statues to imperialists authorized and maintained without the fair consultation of Indigenous communities. As already noted, this perspective sheds new light on Mexico’s Angel of Independence, a public mnemonic object not typically defined as tainted. Authorized under an authoritarian regime and before women gained substantive political power, the monument must be reconceptualized as improperly authorized and in need of democratic revisiting. This improves our understanding of why the monument has been repeatedly vandalized, providing context as to why Mexican activists, and feminist protesters in particular, do not safeguard it as one might with something they consider properly theirs.

Vandalism as symbolic empowerment

In this final section, I argue that the vandalism of tainted public mnemonic objects can be defended as an assertion of symbolic empowerment, defined as an increase in symbolic power and a corrective for democratic deficits in authorization processes for public symbols. By interacting with and modifying public mnemonic objects, those practicing vandalism simultaneously assert participation in unfinished processes of collective authorization and objectify their empowerment in the material landscape. Vandalism conceptualized in this way does not avoid processes of democratic deliberation but claims unfulfilled participation in them by co-opting the tainted object’s material form. Even where protesters do not commit vandalism as an intentional strategy to pursue procedural inclusion but rather seek ideological disruption as a step toward political transformation, a focus on deliberative process illuminates why objectionable commemorations continue to exist, how they function as meaningful sites of democratic contestation, and what role vandalism plays in re-structuring deliberative engagement. A procedural understanding of vandalism avoids the undemocratic charges that plague content-based accounts by challenging conventional understandings of what deliberative, democratic participation looks like.

Where opportunities for collective authorization and re-authorization remain rare, and marginalized citizens face obstacles to full participation in commemorative institutions, strict requirements for deliberative engagement in the informal public sphere reinforce patterns of symbolic powerlessness. While deliberative democratic theory traditionally connects discursive reason-giving to norms for rationality, civility, reasonableness, and non-coercion, these norms are meant to safeguard the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ among participants assumed to share equal status (Habermas, 1996: 306). In a condition where equality and inclusion are not secure, some scholars suggest re-imagining deliberative engagement and loosening these requirements to encourage contestation and more equal participation (Clifford, 2012; Curato et al., 2019; Estlund, 2001; Fung, 2005). While democratic theorists have primarily expanded deliberative participation to include narrative, rhetoric, and emotional appeals (Chambers, 2012; Young, 2002), thinkers also gesture toward interventions in the built environment. For example, Drake (2021: 210) includes graffiti in her ‘more expansive view’ of forms of deliberative, democratic engagement. Drvar (2005) understands the vandalism of public art as a claiming of urban residents’ unfulfilled right to co-create their shared spaces. I argue that public mnemonic object vandalism by groups rendered symbolically powerless asserts unfulfilled participation in authorization processes and empirically functions to re-open these processes for the participation of others. Vandalism amounts to creative participation in processes of designing the physical memory landscape rather than destruction or negation of existing forms, especially in cases involving paint splashing, graffiti, and alteration rather than complete toppling.

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign began on 9 March 2015, when a Black student at UCT threw human excrement at the Cecil Rhodes statue (Gregory, 2021; Marschall, 2017). Black student protestors later wrapped the statue in garbage bags and graffitied its base with phrases including ‘African lives matter’ and ‘Fuck your dream of empire!’ (Fairbanks, 2015; Marback, 2018). Richmond’s Robert E. Lee statue was vandalized during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, with phrases including ‘BLM’ and ‘He Can’t Breathe’, among a constellation of others. Simply looking at photos of activists around the Cecil Rhodes statue or the colorfully graffitied Robert E. Lee statue confirm the scenes’ evocation of agency, creativity, and power. Both cases of vandalism not only claimed unfulfilled participation in incomplete authorization processes but re-opened these processes—launching and anchoring broader deliberations on racism, colonialism, and public memory in their communities. Furthermore, the vandalism’s symbolic empowerment played a unique role in reconstituting the structure of deliberations, encouraging greater standing for marginalized participants in resulting debates by materializing public symbols of contestation and full inclusion.

The Angel of Independence monument was vandalized by feminist protestors in 2019 following a string of rapes by police officers (Islas Weinstein, 2024; Voice of America, 2019). Protesting not the content of the monument but ongoing patriarchal domination in Mexican society, feminist vandals marked their symbolic empowerment and opened conversations about gendered domination by rerouting a material artifact of their historical powerlessness. The Juan de Oñate statue was first vandalized in 1997 when a group of Indigenous protestors sawed off the statue’s right foot to symbolize the conquistador’s brutal policy of cutting off the feet of those who disobeyed him (Brooke, 1998). The vandals wrote a letter to local authorities claiming responsibility for the act and explaining their motives, with reference to the importance of symbolic solidarity with the Acoma Pueblo people (Junes, 2017). The statue was vandalized again in 2017 when an unknown protestor painted Oñate’s foot red (Martinez, 2017). The John MacDonald statue was decapitated in 1992 on the anniversary of the hanging of Louis Riel (Stevenson, 2022), doused in red paint by a group of anonymous ‘anti-colonial’ protestors in 2018 (Montreal Gazette, 2018), and finally toppled in 2020 during Black Lives Matter protests.

These final cases raise the question of whether vandalism must be publicly claimed. The continuing criminalization of vandals, especially those from historically oppressed groups and even those acting from normatively defendable positions, renders taking responsibility and accepting punishment, as is typically required for civil disobedience (see Rawls, 1971), too demanding. However, public claiming is sometimes necessary to identify the actors responsible for vandalism and thus ground symbolic empowerment as a response to historical and ongoing exclusions. In these cases, anonymized messages—such as those sent to authorities by the vandals of the Oñate statue (who later decided to not remain anonymous) and the 2018 vandals of the John MacDonald monument—can be powerful ways to communicate the normative claim to empowerment without requiring that members of historically oppressed groups subject themselves to further oppression by the criminal justice system. Even without these discursive claims, however, vandalism may still play a productive role in re-opening and re-structuring authorizations for public mnemonic objects. As such, monumental vandalism may be situated within the category of ‘political’ or ‘democratic’ disobedience which rejects strict requirements for activists to accept punishment and focuses instead on challenging procedural violations or unfairness in political decision-making (Harcourt, 2012; Markovits, 2005). Furthermore, understood as a democratic, material intervention, monument vandalism highlights two previously unrecognized conclusions. First, preserving tainted monuments in vandalized form would safeguard history while also expressing public denouncement and symbolizing struggles to be heard. Second, cleaning up or restoring forms to their pre-vandalized states without public consultation constitutes a refusal to engage in re-authorization and therefore an explicit reinforcement of non-democratic political forms.

Conclusion

In response to the insufficiency of content-based and epistemological accounts, this article develops a democratic defense of public mnemonic object vandalism. Through the framework of symbolic power, and with a focus on democratic and inclusive processes of ‘collective authorization’, I make three central claims: public mnemonic objects that are improperly authorized generate a symbolic powerlessness of those marginalized; without proper re-authorization processes, this powerlessness survives and provides the basis for defining ‘tainted’ commemorations; and the vandalism of tainted commemorations can be defended as symbolic empowerment for groups facing historical and ongoing powerlessness. On this understanding, monument vandalism claims participation within yet-unfinished deliberative, democratic processes through the public mnemonic object’s physical form. In proposing an account of public mnemonic object vandalism which connects the importance of democratic process to physical mnemonic objects, this article hopes to encourage more work on the co-creation of mnemonic spaces and places.

Returning to the example of the French Revolution displays the theoretical and practical utility of conceptualizing vandalism through the framework of democratic theory. While content-based accounts would likely defend vandalism by revolutionaries against those who recommended bringing at least some artifacts into the new regime to play an educative purpose, a procedural account highlights the importance of the work being done by the Commission of Monuments at the time. The establishment of the Commission provides evidence of an effort to provide venues for re-authorizing public mnemonic objects of the Ancien Régime following revolution. While more historical work would be needed to conclude that the Commission provided opportunities for collective re-authorization that was substantially democratic, a process-based analysis of vandalism reveals a new element of central importance to debates surrounding the term’s originating context, as well as more contemporary expressions of vandalism. Those hoping to avoid vandalism of public mnemonic objects, especially governmental actors, might devote more attention to establishing democratic processes of collective authorization and, especially in the case of historical monuments, re-authorization that would render their subsequent vandalism unjustifiable. Doing so periodically and preemptively, rather than after vandalism has already occurred, is key.