Is there an index or timeline of decolonial iconoclasm?
April 30, 2021 11:48 AM   Subscribe

The Misak have just toppled a statue of colonizer Sebastián de Belalcázar in Cali; this seems to be the sort of thing that's happening ever more frequently. That got me wondering, is there a place that compiles all instances of decolonial statue toppling? Like an index, or timeline. Confederate scum included.
posted by Tom-B to Society & Culture (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 


Best answer: This Wikipedia page is pretty comprehensive, although I don't know how frequently it's updated - it includes the first time the Sebastián de Belalcázar was toppled (back in September) but not the news from yesterday.
posted by theodolite at 12:03 PM on April 30, 2021 [2 favorites]


A comprehensive global one, not that I can tell, although I'm in favor of the project and it would be eminently possible given enough time and interested parties. Do you want to go back as far as the 1776 toppling of the statue of George III in New York, or to the destruction of the statue of Augustus at Meroë in the period after the Romans left what is now Sudan? You'd think someone would have put one together in an appendix of their dissertation at this point, but not in a way that cursory internet research reveals it. James Noyes' 2013 The Politics of Iconoclasm starts out from a religious perspective, but might contain some examples that aren't as well known. Historian Gal Kirn has compared the most recent wave of statue-topplings to historical revisionism around monuments in former Yugoslavia, which I found interesting.
posted by All hands bury the dead at 2:13 PM on April 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


SPLC has a map of Confederate monuments and symbols, including ones that have been removed / torn down (you can toggle between extant, removed and all).
posted by tivalasvegas at 3:18 PM on April 30, 2021


(Though it looks somewhat out of date, unsurprisingly given how much has changed in the last year.)
posted by tivalasvegas at 3:20 PM on April 30, 2021


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