On Black Lives Matter and monument activism from a historical perspective
Anna Jörngården Galili, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, has written an article in the new issue of the journal Representations, with the title: “Black Lives Matter in Paris 1771 and 2021: Monuments Made, Unmade, and Not Made”.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814) Vol. 1. "I am seven hundred years old."
This article reads the contemporary monument conflicts connected to the Black Lives Matter movement in France alongside the erection and destruction of fictional monuments in a bestselling utopian novel from three centuries ago: Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fût jamais (1771).
The article throws light on how contemporary BLM interventions in the cityscape respond to still unresolved issues regarding the meaning of liberté, egalité, and fraternité in relation to colonialism, nationalism, and race; examines the discursive mechanisms behind the history of slavery becoming notoriously unremembered in France; and, in conclusion, considers the unrealized utopian potentiality of Mercier’s novel in relation to the most recent projects to memorialize slavery in Paris.
Anna Jörngården Galili.
About the author
Anna Jörngården Galili is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics. Her research is is comparatively and transnationally orientated and operates mainly in the fields of cultural memory studies and postcolonial theory.
What is the cultural significance of memory? How and why do we remember the past, not only as individuals but across generations, as social and cultural communities? And how do these memory practices relate to politically and emotionally charged questions of national or ethnic identity, historical traumas, and experiences of dislocation, loss and forgetting?
