Every Monument Will Fall

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