Paranoia about the settler past: Sarah Maddison, ‘De-Commemorating Australian Settler Colonialism’, in Sarah Gensburger, Jenny Wüstenberg (eds), De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places, Berghahn, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

Paranoia about the settler past: Sarah Maddison, ‘De-Commemorating Australian Settler Colonialism’, in Sarah Gensburger, Jenny Wüstenberg (eds), De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places, Berghahn, 2023

30Apr24

Excerpt: During 2020, the resurgent global Black Lives Matter movement demanded a new reckoning with violent, racist, colonial histories. Across the United States and the United Kingdom statues of white colonizers and slave traders were pulled down as protestors insisted that these men—and these histories—should no longer be celebrated. Far from the United States and Britain, these scenes were repeated in several Australian cities, where protestors confronted armed police charged with protecting statues of James Cook, Lachlan Macquarie, and other noted colonialists. In Australia, such acts of de-commemoration target the erasure of both historical violence and the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. Indigenous activists in particular see the work of de-commemoration as part of their wider struggles for justice. Unlike other forms of colonialism where the intent was to extract the resources of a territory (often using Indigenous peoples as enslaved or exploited labor), a settler colony like Australia seeks to acquire land and in doing so to replace the Indigenous population with the peoples, institutions, and structures of the new nation.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed