Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. More info: https://www.danhicks.uk/ Phone: +44 (0)1865 613011 Address: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford. OX1 3PP. UK
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 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.
Advance Praise for Every Monument WIll Fall
"Every Monument Will Fall is an extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource" — Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities, UCL
"“Urgent and insightful, Every Monument Will Fall challenges all our presumptions about global history by taking us on a radical tour through the colonial archive.” — Dr Kojo Koram, University of London Birkbeck
"Hicks writes with grace and fierce focus about what we choose to remember and why, in our patterns of thought, our institutions and the built environment in which we live" — Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London
"Brave and clear-sighted. Hicks opens up an extraordinary conversation between the past and the present. This is a book about falling statues, but so much more. It’s about how we’ve been lied to, and how we can approach the past with honesty. Hicks asks whether history and archaeology should be used to justify actions we know impinge on the rights of others - or to understand ourselves better" — Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham
‘An astonishing tour de force. Every Monument Will Fall brilliantly propels us through a history of the interlocking lives of the people—writers, soldiers, academics, white supremacists—who mired the discipline of anthropology in racial violence and imperial longing. In weaving together archival research, critical theory, and biographic narrative with the urgency of a polemicist and in stark metaphors of weaponry and warfare, Hicks restores voice and form to the human subjects who these anthropologists have tried their best to dehumanise and destroy. A powerful follow-up to The Brutish Museums, Every Monument Will Fall will inspire scholars, writers, artists, and activists to challenge the monumental institutions of modernity—the university, the museum, and history itself.’ — Isaac Julien, Distinguished Professor of the Arts, University of California Santa Cruz
“‘Every Monument Will Fall is a reckoning, or better phrased, a wrecking ball to the structural myths that uphold the museum and the monument in western democracies whose spoils are the result of pillage, colonialism, and captivity. A brilliant cross genre text, Every Monument Will Fall is at once rigorous art criticism, intellectual history, critical theory, and an epistolary addressed (in a project about redress and demolishment) to himself as the author, to a composite figure of the western human, to those absorbed into whiteness, to the subject of historical narrative, to the biographical figures who inaugurate the monuments and museums, and those who orchestrate their demise." — Nicole Fleetwood, Paulette Goddard Endowed Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
"A must-read book. Read it to see why the media adulation of aristocracy and monarchy conceals the long history of British state violence, slavery and racism. Read it to learn new ways to be anti-racist, abolitionist and to tell other stories than those commemorated by the monuments that surround us, from statues, to museums and the police" — Nick Mirzoeff, Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU and author of White Sight
The Brutish Museums The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, 2020
Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behin... more Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen.
Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections.
The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.
Archaeology and Photography: time, objectivity and archive., 2019
Lesley McFadyen and Dan Hicks (eds) 2019. Archaeology and Photography: time, objectivity and arch... more Lesley McFadyen and Dan Hicks (eds) 2019. Archaeology and Photography: time, objectivity and archive. London: Bloomsbury
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=1004862 Ho... more Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=1004862 How can Archaeology help us understand our contemporary world? This ground-breaking book reflects on material, visual and digital culture from the Calais “Jungle” – the informal camp where, before its destruction in October 2016, more than 10,000 displaced people lived. LANDE: The Calais 'Jungle' and Beyond reassesses how we understand ‘crisis’, activism, and the infrastructure of national borders in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, foregrounding the politics of environments, time, and the ongoing legacies of empire. Introducing a major collaborative exhibit at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the book argues that an anthropological focus on duration, impermanence and traces of the most recent past can recentre the ongoing human experiences of displacement in Europe today.
The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 2010
volume such as this. First in any acknowledgements for this book must come our 34 contributing au... more volume such as this. First in any acknowledgements for this book must come our 34 contributing authors, to whom we are indebted for their excellent chapters, their accommodation of our comments and requests, and their speedy replies that kept up the momentum of the editorial process for such a large book. We are also grateful to our commissioning editor at OUP, Hilary O'Shea, for the initial idea for this book, and for her patience as we delivered it. Lisa Hill and Sefryn Penrose played an invaluable role in assisting with the proof reading of the manuscript. As the volume took shape and developed, we benefited greatly from discussions with and comments from a range of colleagues. Sometimes these were in relation to specific issues that arose during the editorial process, while sometimes they were in a more oblique connection to the project, but in all cases they played a central role in forming the end product. Special thanks here, in addition to our contributors, are due to
Hicks, D. 2007. The Garden of the World: a historical archaeology of sugar landscapes in the east... more Hicks, D. 2007. The Garden of the World: a historical archaeology of sugar landscapes in the eastern Caribbean. Oxford: Archaeopress (British Archaeological Reports)
Dan Hicks 2021. Glorious Memory. In Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds) What Is History, Now? ... more Dan Hicks 2021. Glorious Memory. In Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds) What Is History, Now? London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 147-167.
Memory and the photological landscape. In S. De Nardi, H. Orange, S. High and E. Koskinen-Koivis... more Memory and the photological landscape. In S. De Nardi, H. Orange, S. High and E. Koskinen-Koivisto (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place. New York: Routledge, pp. 254-260.
What are the temporal, political, and imaginative limits of archaeology? How might archaeologists... more What are the temporal, political, and imaginative limits of archaeology? How might archaeologists apply their discipline to the most recent past or our contemporary world? Dan Hicks on how a new exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum explores these questions and seeks to reframe how we think about archaeology and anthropology in museums today.
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 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.
Advance Praise for Every Monument WIll Fall
"Every Monument Will Fall is an extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource" — Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities, UCL
"“Urgent and insightful, Every Monument Will Fall challenges all our presumptions about global history by taking us on a radical tour through the colonial archive.” — Dr Kojo Koram, University of London Birkbeck
"Hicks writes with grace and fierce focus about what we choose to remember and why, in our patterns of thought, our institutions and the built environment in which we live" — Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London
"Brave and clear-sighted. Hicks opens up an extraordinary conversation between the past and the present. This is a book about falling statues, but so much more. It’s about how we’ve been lied to, and how we can approach the past with honesty. Hicks asks whether history and archaeology should be used to justify actions we know impinge on the rights of others - or to understand ourselves better" — Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham
‘An astonishing tour de force. Every Monument Will Fall brilliantly propels us through a history of the interlocking lives of the people—writers, soldiers, academics, white supremacists—who mired the discipline of anthropology in racial violence and imperial longing. In weaving together archival research, critical theory, and biographic narrative with the urgency of a polemicist and in stark metaphors of weaponry and warfare, Hicks restores voice and form to the human subjects who these anthropologists have tried their best to dehumanise and destroy. A powerful follow-up to The Brutish Museums, Every Monument Will Fall will inspire scholars, writers, artists, and activists to challenge the monumental institutions of modernity—the university, the museum, and history itself.’ — Isaac Julien, Distinguished Professor of the Arts, University of California Santa Cruz
“‘Every Monument Will Fall is a reckoning, or better phrased, a wrecking ball to the structural myths that uphold the museum and the monument in western democracies whose spoils are the result of pillage, colonialism, and captivity. A brilliant cross genre text, Every Monument Will Fall is at once rigorous art criticism, intellectual history, critical theory, and an epistolary addressed (in a project about redress and demolishment) to himself as the author, to a composite figure of the western human, to those absorbed into whiteness, to the subject of historical narrative, to the biographical figures who inaugurate the monuments and museums, and those who orchestrate their demise." — Nicole Fleetwood, Paulette Goddard Endowed Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
"A must-read book. Read it to see why the media adulation of aristocracy and monarchy conceals the long history of British state violence, slavery and racism. Read it to learn new ways to be anti-racist, abolitionist and to tell other stories than those commemorated by the monuments that surround us, from statues, to museums and the police" — Nick Mirzoeff, Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU and author of White Sight
The Brutish Museums The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, 2020
Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behin... more Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen.
Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections.
The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.
Archaeology and Photography: time, objectivity and archive., 2019
Lesley McFadyen and Dan Hicks (eds) 2019. Archaeology and Photography: time, objectivity and arch... more Lesley McFadyen and Dan Hicks (eds) 2019. Archaeology and Photography: time, objectivity and archive. London: Bloomsbury
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=1004862 Ho... more Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=1004862 How can Archaeology help us understand our contemporary world? This ground-breaking book reflects on material, visual and digital culture from the Calais “Jungle” – the informal camp where, before its destruction in October 2016, more than 10,000 displaced people lived. LANDE: The Calais 'Jungle' and Beyond reassesses how we understand ‘crisis’, activism, and the infrastructure of national borders in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, foregrounding the politics of environments, time, and the ongoing legacies of empire. Introducing a major collaborative exhibit at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the book argues that an anthropological focus on duration, impermanence and traces of the most recent past can recentre the ongoing human experiences of displacement in Europe today.
The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 2010
volume such as this. First in any acknowledgements for this book must come our 34 contributing au... more volume such as this. First in any acknowledgements for this book must come our 34 contributing authors, to whom we are indebted for their excellent chapters, their accommodation of our comments and requests, and their speedy replies that kept up the momentum of the editorial process for such a large book. We are also grateful to our commissioning editor at OUP, Hilary O'Shea, for the initial idea for this book, and for her patience as we delivered it. Lisa Hill and Sefryn Penrose played an invaluable role in assisting with the proof reading of the manuscript. As the volume took shape and developed, we benefited greatly from discussions with and comments from a range of colleagues. Sometimes these were in relation to specific issues that arose during the editorial process, while sometimes they were in a more oblique connection to the project, but in all cases they played a central role in forming the end product. Special thanks here, in addition to our contributors, are due to
Hicks, D. 2007. The Garden of the World: a historical archaeology of sugar landscapes in the east... more Hicks, D. 2007. The Garden of the World: a historical archaeology of sugar landscapes in the eastern Caribbean. Oxford: Archaeopress (British Archaeological Reports)
Dan Hicks 2021. Glorious Memory. In Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds) What Is History, Now? ... more Dan Hicks 2021. Glorious Memory. In Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds) What Is History, Now? London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 147-167.
Memory and the photological landscape. In S. De Nardi, H. Orange, S. High and E. Koskinen-Koivis... more Memory and the photological landscape. In S. De Nardi, H. Orange, S. High and E. Koskinen-Koivisto (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place. New York: Routledge, pp. 254-260.
What are the temporal, political, and imaginative limits of archaeology? How might archaeologists... more What are the temporal, political, and imaginative limits of archaeology? How might archaeologists apply their discipline to the most recent past or our contemporary world? Dan Hicks on how a new exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum explores these questions and seeks to reframe how we think about archaeology and anthropology in museums today.
How authentic are the concepts of the “universal” or “encyclopaedic” museum? A commentary on the ... more How authentic are the concepts of the “universal” or “encyclopaedic” museum? A commentary on the idea of the "universal museum" as a myth invented in the 21st century.
This is an essay about the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeolo... more This is an essay about the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeological knowledge. It revisits Tim Ingold’s 1993 paper ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, considering its relationship with the phenomenological and interpretive archaeologies of the 1990s and what we learn from it today. Engaged not so much in an ‘ontological turn’ as in a kind of archival return, the essay compares Ingold’s discussion of Bruegel’s painting The Harvesters (1565) with an archaeological photograph from 1993. A discussion of the after-effects of performance follows, and four theses about temporality, landscape, modernity and revisiting are put forward: 1) The passage of time transforms archaeological knowledge; 2) Archaeological knowledge transforms the passage of time; 3) An archaeological landscape is an object that is known through remapping; 4) Archaeological knowledge is what we leave behind. The essay concludes that archaeology is best understood not as the study of the temporality of the landscape, as Ingold had argued, but as the study of the temporality of the landscape revisited.
A review of the events surrounding the launch of HAU’s expanded edition of Marcel Mauss's The Gif... more A review of the events surrounding the launch of HAU’s expanded edition of Marcel Mauss's The Gift, and reflects on their implications for history and theory in anthropology.
Cite this review as: Hicks, D. 2016. Review of Shannon Lee Dawdy "Patina". Sculpture Journal 25(3... more Cite this review as: Hicks, D. 2016. Review of Shannon Lee Dawdy "Patina". Sculpture Journal 25(3): 448-449.
Dan Hicks & Mary C. Beaudry 2010. Introduction. Material Culture Studies: A Reactionary View. In ... more Dan Hicks & Mary C. Beaudry 2010. Introduction. Material Culture Studies: A Reactionary View. In D. Hicks and M.C. Beaudry (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-21.
With the refugee crisis, Brexit, and the rise of populist extremism, we must defend the teaching ... more With the refugee crisis, Brexit, and the rise of populist extremism, we must defend the teaching of anthropology. And in doing so, we might expand and rethink our conception of "the humanities". (Article in The Conversation)
the role of the classificatory anthropology of the 1870s and 1880s on both sides of the Atlantic ... more the role of the classificatory anthropology of the 1870s and 1880s on both sides of the Atlantic in the emergence of the idea of organizing anthropological knowledge. It suggests that this emergence was bound up with the problem of classifying anthropological knowledge in material form in European and North American museums. Second, the paper considers how our knowledge of the discipline's past can develop from the study of objects and documents (rather than only through rereading anthropologists' published texts), in a manner akin to documentary archaeology. In this respect, the anthropological problem of organizing knowledge in material form is still with us, but with a new challenge: How adequate are our current forms of disciplinary historiography for the use of material evidence? Rather than proposing a new set of "charter myths," the paper explores writing the history of four-field anthropology as a form of material culture studies or historical archaeology (in other words, as a subfield of anthropology), working with the "time warps" created by museums and archives in which disciplinary history is not always already written.
A reply to comments by Laurent Olivier, Matt Edgeworth and Tim Ingold on the paper "The Temporali... more A reply to comments by Laurent Olivier, Matt Edgeworth and Tim Ingold on the paper "The Temporality of the Landscape Revisited"
Unrechtskontexte (Contexts of Injustice): dismantling colonial legacies from Berlin to London
In... more Unrechtskontexte (Contexts of Injustice): dismantling colonial legacies from Berlin to London
In 2013, the German Museums Association (Deutscher Museumsbund) issued guidance on the treatment of human remains in museum collections, in which they introduced a novel concept. The idea of 'Unrechtskontext' (context of injustice) should, they suggested, guide curatorial ethics when assessing the circumstances in which museum collections were acquired. Among considerations here was not just the contexts of the past, but also whether any particular injustice 'continued to have an effect in the present'.
A decade later, this question of the unfinished nature of certain 'contexts of injustice' now lies at the centre of Euro-American debates about the enduring legacies of empire, 'scientific racism', and theories of cultural supremacy. This lecture takes stock of recent events in Europe and North America - from removing statues and un-naming buildings to returning artefacts from colonial museums, but also to ongoing violent regimes of display at the British Museum and now rekindled at Berlin's Humboldt Forum. The lecture asks: How should we understand the 'Unrechtskontexte' of colonial legacies today? By the standards of the time - or by the values that we hold today? And how can these legacies be meaningfully dismantled?
I'm looking forward to giving this public lecture and masterclass on Tuesday 1
November in Glasgo... more I'm looking forward to giving this public lecture and masterclass on Tuesday 1 November in Glasgow. It's for for a newly-formed graduate programme for material culture research titled Collections: an Enlightenment Pedagogy for the 21st Century, which is led by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanties at the University of Glasgow, in partnership with the Hunterian Museum and the Leverhulme Trust. The lecture is in the Kelvin Hall Lecture Cinema, and the event is from 5pm to 7pm. You can sign up for the event, which is free, on the eventbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-stuff-of-research-masterclass-prof-dan-hicks-tickets-28722764562
This talk will introduce current research into the early archaeological fieldwork of Augustus Hen... more This talk will introduce current research into the early archaeological fieldwork of Augustus Henry Lane Fox (later Pitt-Rivers), assemblages from which have been recently re-discovered at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The paper considers the potential of these collections, made between c. 1864 and 1880, as a resource for writing the material history of archaeological practice, rather than purely the social or intellectual history of archaeological thought.
17th March 2011, 6pm - 8pm
Lecture for Material Life of Things Research Project, Courtauld Insti... more 17th March 2011, 6pm - 8pm
Lecture for Material Life of Things Research Project, Courtauld Institute.
With Professor Danny Miller (UCL) as Discussant.
This paper reflects upon the status of the idea of 'the fragment' in contemporary interdisciplinary material culture studies. In doing so, it uses anthropological thinking to interrogate how we comprehend the forms that the material, the cultural, and the interdisciplinary can take in the study of things.
Britain must give the Benin Bronzes back to Africa – it’s our moral duty
The Daily Telegraph 5 N... more Britain must give the Benin Bronzes back to Africa – it’s our moral duty
The Daily Telegraph 5 November 2020
A curator at Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum explains why we should return African artefacts to their home continent at long last
Through an award of £76,654 from the Designation Development Fund, Excavating Pitt-Rivers has enh... more Through an award of £76,654 from the Designation Development Fund, Excavating Pitt-Rivers has enhanced the care, documentation and public understanding of the earliest archaeological collections that were acquired by General Augustus Pitt-Rivers from sites across England, and which are held at the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM). Led by Dr Dan Hicks (Lecturer-Curator in Archaeology), the project team has documented, photographed and published to the Museum's online database c. 10,687 archaeological objects that were collected and excavated by General Pitt-Rivers from across England between c. 1864 and 1880.
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Books by Dan Hicks
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 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.
Advance Praise for Every Monument WIll Fall
"Every Monument Will Fall is an extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource"
— Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities, UCL
"“Urgent and insightful, Every Monument Will Fall challenges all our presumptions about global history by taking us on a radical tour through the colonial archive.”
— Dr Kojo Koram, University of London Birkbeck
"Hicks writes with grace and fierce focus about what we choose to remember and why, in our patterns of thought, our institutions and the built environment in which we live"
— Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London
"Brave and clear-sighted. Hicks opens up an extraordinary conversation between the past and the present. This is a book about falling statues, but so much more. It’s about how we’ve been lied to, and how we can approach the past with honesty. Hicks asks whether history and archaeology should be used to justify actions we know impinge on the rights of others - or to understand ourselves better"
— Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham
‘An astonishing tour de force. Every Monument Will Fall brilliantly propels us through a history of the interlocking lives of the people—writers, soldiers, academics, white supremacists—who mired the discipline of anthropology in racial violence and imperial longing. In weaving together archival research, critical theory, and biographic narrative with the urgency of a polemicist and in stark metaphors of weaponry and warfare, Hicks restores voice and form to the human subjects who these anthropologists have tried their best to dehumanise and destroy. A powerful follow-up to The Brutish Museums, Every Monument Will Fall will inspire scholars, writers, artists, and activists to challenge the monumental institutions of modernity—the university, the museum, and history itself.’
— Isaac Julien, Distinguished Professor of the Arts, University of California Santa Cruz
“‘Every Monument Will Fall is a reckoning, or better phrased, a wrecking ball to the structural myths that uphold the museum and the monument in western democracies whose spoils are the result of pillage, colonialism, and captivity. A brilliant cross genre text, Every Monument Will Fall is at once rigorous art criticism, intellectual history, critical theory, and an epistolary addressed (in a project about redress and demolishment) to himself as the author, to a composite figure of the western human, to those absorbed into whiteness, to the subject of historical narrative, to the biographical figures who inaugurate the monuments and museums, and those who orchestrate their demise."
— Nicole Fleetwood, Paulette Goddard Endowed Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
"A must-read book. Read it to see why the media adulation of aristocracy and monarchy conceals the long history of British state violence, slavery and racism. Read it to learn new ways to be anti-racist, abolitionist and to tell other stories than those commemorated by the monuments that surround us, from statues, to museums and the police"
— Nick Mirzoeff, Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU and author of White Sight
Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections.
The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.
Papers by Dan Hicks
https://hyperallergic.com/745527/the-risks-that-lurk-in-europes-scramble-for-decolonization/
Read all the contribututions, with all images, here https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-19/death-writing-in-the-colonial-museums
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 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.
Advance Praise for Every Monument WIll Fall
"Every Monument Will Fall is an extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource"
— Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities, UCL
"“Urgent and insightful, Every Monument Will Fall challenges all our presumptions about global history by taking us on a radical tour through the colonial archive.”
— Dr Kojo Koram, University of London Birkbeck
"Hicks writes with grace and fierce focus about what we choose to remember and why, in our patterns of thought, our institutions and the built environment in which we live"
— Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London
"Brave and clear-sighted. Hicks opens up an extraordinary conversation between the past and the present. This is a book about falling statues, but so much more. It’s about how we’ve been lied to, and how we can approach the past with honesty. Hicks asks whether history and archaeology should be used to justify actions we know impinge on the rights of others - or to understand ourselves better"
— Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham
‘An astonishing tour de force. Every Monument Will Fall brilliantly propels us through a history of the interlocking lives of the people—writers, soldiers, academics, white supremacists—who mired the discipline of anthropology in racial violence and imperial longing. In weaving together archival research, critical theory, and biographic narrative with the urgency of a polemicist and in stark metaphors of weaponry and warfare, Hicks restores voice and form to the human subjects who these anthropologists have tried their best to dehumanise and destroy. A powerful follow-up to The Brutish Museums, Every Monument Will Fall will inspire scholars, writers, artists, and activists to challenge the monumental institutions of modernity—the university, the museum, and history itself.’
— Isaac Julien, Distinguished Professor of the Arts, University of California Santa Cruz
“‘Every Monument Will Fall is a reckoning, or better phrased, a wrecking ball to the structural myths that uphold the museum and the monument in western democracies whose spoils are the result of pillage, colonialism, and captivity. A brilliant cross genre text, Every Monument Will Fall is at once rigorous art criticism, intellectual history, critical theory, and an epistolary addressed (in a project about redress and demolishment) to himself as the author, to a composite figure of the western human, to those absorbed into whiteness, to the subject of historical narrative, to the biographical figures who inaugurate the monuments and museums, and those who orchestrate their demise."
— Nicole Fleetwood, Paulette Goddard Endowed Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
"A must-read book. Read it to see why the media adulation of aristocracy and monarchy conceals the long history of British state violence, slavery and racism. Read it to learn new ways to be anti-racist, abolitionist and to tell other stories than those commemorated by the monuments that surround us, from statues, to museums and the police"
— Nick Mirzoeff, Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU and author of White Sight
Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections.
The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.
https://hyperallergic.com/745527/the-risks-that-lurk-in-europes-scramble-for-decolonization/
Read all the contribututions, with all images, here https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-19/death-writing-in-the-colonial-museums
In 2013, the German Museums Association (Deutscher Museumsbund) issued guidance on the treatment of human remains in museum collections, in which they introduced a novel concept. The idea of 'Unrechtskontext' (context of injustice) should, they suggested, guide curatorial ethics when assessing the circumstances in which museum collections were acquired. Among considerations here was not just the contexts of the past, but also whether any particular injustice 'continued to have an effect in the present'.
A decade later, this question of the unfinished nature of certain 'contexts of injustice' now lies at the centre of Euro-American debates about the enduring legacies of empire, 'scientific racism', and theories of cultural supremacy. This lecture takes stock of recent events in Europe and North America - from removing statues and un-naming buildings to returning artefacts from colonial museums, but also to ongoing violent regimes of display at the British Museum and now rekindled at Berlin's Humboldt Forum. The lecture asks: How should we understand the 'Unrechtskontexte' of colonial legacies today? By the standards of the time - or by the values that we hold today? And how can these legacies be meaningfully dismantled?
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/goethe-annual-lecture-by-dan-hicks-tickets-227734799917
November in Glasgow. It's for for a newly-formed graduate programme for
material culture research titled Collections: an Enlightenment Pedagogy for
the 21st Century, which is led by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and
Humanties at the University of Glasgow, in partnership with the Hunterian
Museum and the Leverhulme Trust. The lecture is in the Kelvin Hall Lecture
Cinema, and the event is from 5pm to 7pm. You can sign up for the event,
which is free, on the eventbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-stuff-of-research-masterclass-prof-dan-hicks-tickets-28722764562
Lecture for Material Life of Things Research Project, Courtauld Institute.
With Professor Danny Miller (UCL) as Discussant.
This paper reflects upon the status of the idea of 'the fragment' in contemporary interdisciplinary material culture studies. In doing so, it uses anthropological thinking to interrogate how we comprehend the forms that the material, the cultural, and the interdisciplinary can take in the study of things.
More details: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/projects/materiallifeofthings.shtml
The Daily Telegraph 5 November 2020
A curator at Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum explains why we should return African artefacts to their home continent at long last
The Guardian 15 October 2020
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/the-uk-government-is-trying-to-draw-museums-into-a-fake-culture-war