If monuments articulate ideologies in physical space and material form, it follows that regime change can rapidly elevate the visibility of certain monuments, making them obvious flashpoints for protests or other public statements. Monuments, by which we understand intentional interventions in collective memory, typically offer shortcuts to political symbolism. The period since the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provides no shortage of examples, such as the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003. The persistent use of WWII memorials in the former Yugoslavia’s ‘concrete utopia’ offers telling engagements with pasts that are articulated in various media. The deep history of the topic might also include the monuments of the ancient Egyptians or Romans, or iconoclasm in the Byzantine and Muslim worlds.
Monuments to Nostalgia takes a comparative approach to monuments around the globe in contexts of political change. We are especially interested in the temporalities implicit in commemorative constructions – the ways in which structures may look both backward and forward, while engaging concerns of the present moment. What are we to make of the (often contested) persistence of physical monuments, even as the politics around them changes radically? Drawing inspiration from Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001), we will explore the distinction between restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. On this model, monuments are part of a broader conversation about re-encountering particular pasts, and the social imaginaries and politics linked to such engagements. What might transregional comparison yield? What might monumentality mean in our own times?
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Speakers:
Jacob Dlamini
Associate Professor of History, Princeton University
Jacob Dlamini is a historian of Africa, with an interest in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial African History. He obtained a Ph.D. from Yale University in 2012 and is also a graduate of Wits University in South Africa and Sussex University in England. Jacob held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Barcelona, Spain, from November 2011 to April 2015, and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University from August 2014 to May 2015. A qualified field guide, Jacob is also interested in comparative and global histories of conservation and national parks.
Vladimir Kulić
Professor and David Lingle Faculty Fellow, Department of Architecture, Iowa State University
Vladimir Kulić is an architectural historian, curator, and educator who specializes in the architectural history of socialism, Yugoslavia, and Eastern Europe. He co-curated several architectural exhibitions, most importantly the acclaimed show Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2018). His books include Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia (2012), Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities (2014), Bogdanović by Bogdanović: Yugoslav Memorials through the Eyes of Their Architect (2018), and Second World Postmodernisms: Architecture and Society Under Late Socialism (2019).
Trinidad Rico
Associate Professor and Director of Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies, Department of Art History, Rutgers University
Trinidad Rico holds a B.A. in archaeology from the University of Cambridge, an M.A. in conservation from University College London, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University. She has been senior honorary lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology of University College London and vice president of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies. Her research focuses on the study of heritage practices, discourses, and forms of expertise in Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and South America. Her latest monograph, Global Heritage, Religion, and Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2021) examines the history and effects of secularism in global heritage.
Moderator:
Laura Wittman
Associate Professor of French and Italian, Stanford University
Laura Wittman primarily works on 19th- and 20th-century Italian and French literature from a comparative perspective. She is interested in connections between modernity, religion, and politics. Much of her work explores the role of the ineffable, the mystical, and the body in modern poetry, philosophy, and culture. Her book, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body, has just been published by the University of Toronto Press. Laura Wittman is also the editor of a special issue of the Romanic Review entitled Italy and France: Imagined Geographies (2006), as well as the co-editor of an anthology of Futurist manifestos and literary works, Futurism: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2009). She has published articles on d'Annunzio, Marinetti, Fogazzaro, Ungaretti, Montale, and Sereni, as well as on decadent-era culture and Italian cinema. She received her Ph.D. in 2001 from Yale University where she wrote a dissertation entitled "Mystics Without God: Spirituality and Form in Italian and French Modernism."