{"id":2056,"date":"2020-12-17T13:50:17","date_gmt":"2020-12-17T11:50:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newurl\/new-site\/?page_id=2056"},"modified":"2021-04-02T13:33:46","modified_gmt":"2021-04-02T10:33:46","slug":"memory-monuments","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/decolonizehellas.org\/en\/memory-monuments\/","title":{"rendered":"Memory \u2014 Monuments"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”M\u00cbMORY\u2014MONUME\u0418TS” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:left” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]\u0399mperial nostalgia, colonial aphasia, postcolonial melancholy<\/em> are some of the terms that have been used to describe the distancing of the brutal history of colonialism and slavery from contemporary European public memory — and responsibility. Today, around the world, grassroots demands for a critical history of the present are challenging power by radicalizing remembrance as part of an agenda of restitution, reparation and repair.<\/p>\n

This thematic cluster, centered on narratives <\/em>and materialities<\/em>, starts from the assumption that the linear chronologies of national history, its institutions, such as the archive, university and museum, its symbolic organization of public space and exhibitionary architectures, as well as its gendered division of agency \u2013 heroes vs. mothers, are themselves central artifacts and technologies of European colonialism. Black, indigenous and anti-colonial thinkers have long pointed out the impossibility of dismantling the edifice of western colonial power, patriarchy and white supremacy with the \u201ctools of the master.\u201d What is at stake then is not so much the addition of stories of the marginalized to the official archives, as a break with the logics that excluded them to start with (or included them in problematic ways).<\/p>\n

Today as the bicentennial celebration of the Greek Revolution begins to unfold as a European <\/em>success story, the moment seems ripe to bring these urgent demands for the decolonization of knowledge, of the university and the museum in dialogue with critical discussions, research and initiatives through which academics, artists, architects, museologists and activists in Greece have already been contesting the Greek monumental landscape — broadly understood as the manifestation and projection of dominant historical narratives and actors in the public sphere in statuary, monuments, rituals and institutions of knowledge.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”4152″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

The marble statue of the Diadoumenos (\u201cdiadem-bearer\u201d) held by two workers from Mykonos, during the first French archaeological excavations on Delos (1894). Courtesy of the French School of Athens. Source: Ephorate of Antiquities of Cyclades<\/span><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Narratives” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The dominance of the nation-state as a frame for narrating history has made it difficult to trace linkages and processes across states, continents and oceans, related to colonial histories \u00a0\u2013 \u00a0as well as to resistances to them. Furthermore, the habitual narration of the history of Europe from within its geographical borders as an anthology of national histories, enables the convenient \u201coffloading\u201d of the bloodiest crimes of colonialism back to the histories of former colonial possessions, fostering a sense of white innocence and white superiority. Meanwhile as historians of the Subaltern Studies Collective have discovered in their struggles to write truly emancipated, decolonized histories, the conventions of academic history discourse in and of themselves enshrine the \u201cEurope\u201d \u00a0\u2013 \u00a0of modernity, capitalist progress, citizenship and the nation-state \u00a0\u2013 \u00a0as secret subject of all<\/em> national histories.<\/p>\n

The emplotment of Greek history as a chapter of European history thus inevitably produces silences, which derive from a bedrock of white supremacist ideology. Reading Greek history from former colonies rather than the metropole suggests some possible questions to explore:<\/p>\n