Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography, and Nationalism

Since the 19th century at least public monuments have been the foci for collective participation in the politics and public life of villages, towns, and cities. They have acted as important centres around which local and national political and cultural positions have been articulated. I argue that monuments are an important, but underutilised, resource for the geographer interested in debates surrounding national identity. Through a variety of examples, I explore the ways in which examinations of the sociology, iconography, spatialisation, and gendering of statues reveal important ways in which national ‘imagined communities’ are constructed.

[1]  Marita Sturken,et al.  The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial , 1991 .

[2]  J. Laughlin.  The political geography of ‘nation-building’ and nationalism in social sciences: structural vs. dialectical accounts , 1986 .

[3]  A. Hepburn,et al.  Nationalism and Socialism in Twentieth-Century Ireland , 1977 .

[4]  李金梅,et al.  Nations And Nationalism Since 1780 , 2013 .

[5]  N. Johnson.  Sculpting heroic histories: celebrating the centenary of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland , 1994 .

[6]  G. Mosse.  Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars , 1990 .

[7]  David Harvey.  MONUMENT AND MYTH , 1979 .

[8]  Michael J. Heffernan,et al.  For Ever England: the Western Front and the Politics of Remembrance in Britain , 1995 .

[9]  J. E. Young.  The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Monument , 1989 .

[10]  K. Savage.  CHAPTER VII. The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument , 1994 .

[11]  J. Gillis.  INTRODUCTION. Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship , 1994 .

[12]  John J. Winberry.  “Lest We Forget”: The Confederate Monument and the Southern Townscape , 2015 .

[13]  Paul Anthony Saporito.  THE CITY AS TEXT: THE POLITICS OF LANDSCAPE INTERPRETATION IN THE KANDYAN KINGDOM , 1992, Landscape Journal.

[14]  J. Agnew,et al.  Place and Politics : The Geographical Mediation of State and Society , 1988 .

[15]  D. Mccrone.  Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation , 1992 .

[16]  M. Watts.  Space for Everything (A Commentary) , 1992 .

[17]  H. Gulley.  Women and the Lost Cause: preserving a Confederate identity in the American Deep South , 1993 .

[18]  P. Nora.  Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire , 1989 .

[19]  B. Graham.  No Place of the Mind: Contested Protestant Representations of Ulster , 1994 .

[20]  Brooks D. Simpson.  Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (review) , 2012 .

[21]  J. Chestnutt.  "Who fears to speak of '98?" , 1897 .

[22]  Barry Schwartz,et al.  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past , 1991, American Journal of Sociology.

[23]  David R. Reynolds.  Political geography: thinking globally and locally , 1992 .

[24]  Thomas W. Laqueur,et al.  CHAPTER VIII. Memory and Naming in the Great War , 1994 .

[25]  James S. Duncan,et al.  The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations , 1989 .

[26]  A. Smyth.  The Floozie in the Jacuzzi , 1989 .

[27]  D. Cosgrove.  ... Then we take Berlin: cultural geography 1989-90 , 1990 .

[28]  Denis Cosgrove,et al.  Geography is Everywhere: Culture and Symbolism in Human Landscapes , 1989 .

[29]  B. Schwartz,et al.  Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism. , 1990 .

[30]  A. Jackson.  Unionist Myths, 1912-1985 , 1992 .

[31]  Margaret R. Higonnet,et al.  Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars , 1990 .