The contemporary insurgency against anti-Black policing has buoyed a parallel insurgency against public memorializations of white supremacy. While routinely charged with “destroying history,” with each toppled statue or tagged monument the movement performs a complex intervention into history, aesthetics, and politics. What claims on or against public regimes of visuality, public history, and political futurity are being enacted in this rebellious iconoclasm? What do they ask us to ask?

The working group on Slavery and Visual Culture invites you to an open discussion in which we will try to think with these acts, their visual archives, and their performance repertoires. The goal of our discussion will be to generate questions that these performances ask or open up. We will meet on Tuesday, June 16, at 2pm (CT) on Zoom.

There is no scholarly reading for the event; instead, we ask participants to look through the archive of events of monument destruction that we have been compiling. If you have a particular example you would like us to consider but that isn’t in our cloud folder, please let us know and we can add it.

Click here to register for the meeting (Zoom). The password is insurgency.