Request to End Participation in Confederate Monument Lawsuit

Confederate Monuments, like all public monuments, are a form of state speech. As such, they are prohibited from endorsing, or expressing nostalgia for, racial hierarchy and white supremacy. In many cases, Confederate monuments are reasonably seen as expressing these, and are therefore prohibited forms of state speech. But Confederate monuments are also a very diverse set of objects, varying in terms of their time of construction, their spatial location, their form, and their inscriptions. Some monuments are more objectionable than others because of their characteristics on these dimensions, and our normative assessments must take account of these features.

de arte, 2019

Despite public outrage from some quarters, claiming that the city’s history was being erased, in 2015 the (white) Mayor of New Orleans, with the support of the black-majority City Council, voted to take down four Confederacy statues. Constructed between 1870 and 1910, these Confederate monuments disseminated the Myth of the Lost Cause—that Southern men had fought the American Civil War in defence of a distinctive way of life—thereby failing to acknowledge the Confederacy’s role in the history of slavery. Despite more than a century of segregation and oppression, African Americans in New Orleans confronted the message of white supremacy and created counter-monuments that offered alternative histories to those erected to the Confederacy. This article concentrates on two examples of counter-monuments in New Orleans: the tomb of the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau and the Carnival dress of Black Indians. It demonstrates how these counter-monumental forms have historically rejected white entitlement, recalling an alternative vision of New Orleans history that centres on its black identity.

American Studies in Scandinavia 52:1, pp. 121-142, 2020

In 2015 there emerged a nationwide campaign to remove all Confederate memorials commemorating white supremacy of "the old South" from public parks and city centers in the United States. Given that fighting racism and fascism is not equivalent to fighting monuments, one can ask if an attack on dead slaveholders and famous American Confederate generals is worth a large-scale cleansing of the American cultural landscape. Questioning some of the rationales of the campaign is not about defending these statues. If people democratically so decide, they may well get rid of any historical memorials they find ethically offensive. This essay deals with the issue as it pertains to the American cultural landscape. Keywords: Confederate statues, Historical memorials, Civil War, Cultural History, Southern history, American history

2020

The Councilor: A Journal of the Social Studies, 2018

The Journal of African American History, 2018

Outros Tempos – Pesquisa em Foco - História, 2018

In 2017, the City of New Orleans removed four segregation-era monuments celebrating the Southern Confederacy and valorizing white supremacist ideology. As in other cities, efforts to remove such monuments are not new, and historically have been connected to collective challenges to racialized inequality, and more recently to transna-tional postcolonial struggles. Given the longstanding activism in favor of removing such monuments I ask, Why now? In exploring this question, I examine the circulation of images, talk, and text about the monuments in relation to the city's post-2005 political economy and find that people's expressed sentiments regarding the statues illuminate the ongoing challenges faced by New Orleans' multiracial working-class and poor residents .

In his contribution to the roundtable in Museum Anthropology on the Confederate memorial debate, Mark Auslander critically reflects on proposals to move these memorial into museum spaces. Museum Anthropology, Vol. 41, Iss. 2, pp. 137–39 © 2018