Statue: Historical Artifact AND Protest Symbol

Throughout human history, statues of heroes and leaders have been erected to celebrate and heroes or leaders who were considered statue-worthy. These generally reflected people deserving of public admiration, commemmoration, and immortalizaton, and symbolically meaningful to serve as a face for and as an inspiration to the community. At times, however, not all the historical figures were so worthy of commemoration. In that case, the statues took on a new symbolic meaning. In this context, I show how statues have taken on a new symbolic meaning when they have been used constructively as a avenue of civic activity in variety of historical contexts including political activism, social protests, and national revolutions. This project focuses anti-colonial (or anti-neo-colonial) protests in the era from the 1700's to the present day and with a particular emphasis on countries of African diasporic descent. At present this website includes a summary and commentary of several statues related to protest movements in United States, England, Africa, and the Caribbean from the 1776 until present day. It would be interesting to potentially expand the scope of the project to include additional statues and contexts.