Combating Oppression with New Commemorations

Christopher C. Fennell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040398098
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

Combating Oppression with New Commemorations examines the ways in which marginalized groups can confront oppressive regimes through commemorations and advocacy of their own heritage.

Presenting case studies from across the globe, the volume provides invaluable insights into the diverse strategies and various disciplinary approaches being used to counter oppression through commemorations of the heritage of marginalized groups. Reminding the reader that such commemorations are often created by individuals who have directly confronted traumas of oppression, contributors emphasize that their survivance, successes, and vitality are tributes to human resilience and creativity. Chapters also demonstrate how such commemorations can advance recognition of the group's diverse legacies and cultural identity and help enhance social and economic equities for that population across local, regional, and national scales. It is also made clear that they can provide resources for reconciliation negotiations with other social collectives who seek to oppress the marginalized group. These dynamics can facilitate truth-telling, accountability, recovery of unrecorded histories, revitalization, increments of healing, and efforts to avoid future repetitions of past and present social traumas.

Combating Oppression with New Commemorations will be essential reading for academics, and students working in heritage studies, archaeology, anthropology, material culture studies, landscape analysis, and museum studies. It will also be of great interest to practitioners and activists around the world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Series Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Commemorative Engagements
• 2 Monuments of Movement: Purposeful Remembering and Forgetting of the 1932 La Matanza (Massacre) in Western El Salvador
• 3 Decolonizing Monument Designation in the Caribbean: Native Raizal Heritage and Cultural Patrimony on Old Providence and Santa Catalina Islands, Colombia
• 4 Reparative Commemorations of Emancipation in the Modern World
• 5 Relationships between Governance, Research, and Communities: Striving for Restorative Justice for St. Eustatius in the Caribbean
• 6 Cultural Revitalization and a Seat of Common Heritage in Grenada
• 7 “Now Our Remembered Are Forgotten”: An Archaeology of the National Transgender Memorial Site in the United Kingdom
• 8 A New Memorial for an Old Forgotten Tragedy: The 1871 Massacre in Los Angeles
• 9 What Would Mother Jones Have Said?: The Progressive Miners of America and Their Monument
• 10 As We Continue to Wipe the Tears: Sequels of the First Nation Boarding School System and Issues of Repatriation
• 11 Monuments and Memorials: Art, Truth-Telling, and Memory
• 12 Asserting Rights and Justice through Special Black American Yards
• 13 A Tale of Three Cemeteries: The Challenge of Commemorating the Past
• Index