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South Africa – Canada alone was considered to have achieved this level of maturity because it had established a national school of art. The Wembley exhibition has figured as an important moment in national art history only in Canada. 2 In this chapter I explore why that moment was identified by Canada as memorable, and as such written into the annals of national cultural history, whereas it was consigned to insignificance and erased from the collective memory by the other Dominions. I argue that where a nation was most successful
Legacies of colonial empire are present in the demarcations of state borders, in architecture, on the pedestals of monuments, in books, and in other forms. Heroic men have not been forgotten but at the same time erstwhile insurgents rebelling against the colonial order are now celebrated as freedom fighters. Even commodities of daily life, such as coffee or rubber, bear the deep imprint of their colonial histories. This book presents imperial history as a history of interwoven, overlapping, partly contradictory memories in which non-European outlooks are considered on a more equal footing, alongside the recollections of former colonial masters. These include imperial architecture in nineteenth-century Algeria, the Koregaon obelisk in India, the Hungarian monument commemorating the thirteen martyrs of Arad, and Japan's twentieth-century post-war repositories of memories of war, empire, suffering and heroism. The heroes and villains of the imperial era include the Dutch colonial governor Jan Pietersz Coen; Robert Clive, the victor of Plassey; and the explorer and missionary David Livingstone. Other manifestations of memory include Imam Shamil who resisted the troops of Tsarist Russia. The book looks at the fragility and precariousness of repositories of imperial memory. It traces the cycles of obliviousness and remembrance, of suppression and political instrumentalisation that have accompanied the history of Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. The history of Berlin's Botanical Garden is intimately intertwined with Germany's colonial endeavours but this important aspect of the institution's history has remained all but suppressed.
The imperial past is all around us. Decades have come and gone since the dissolution of Europe’s great colonial empires, but the footprints they have left in the realm of memory all over the world are plain to see. Legacies of empire are present in the demarcations of state borders, in architecture and urban topographies, on the pedestals of monuments, in books, on cinema
invocation of an image of the world as it ought to be. In this sense, it is possible to suggest that as device, figure, or symbol Queen Victoria works within Aboriginal people’s stories about colonisation as a memory that seeks to make present an absence. 12 Not surprisingly, as will become clear, her name was most often evoked by Aboriginal people in the face of threat or in the
the idea of Britain’s fight against the nefarious activities of ‘piratical’ slave traders on the high seas. But these objects also illustrate the ways in which the memory of suppression activity has been channelled in particular directions or sublimated altogether. The material evidence of this episode is either almost entirely missing (the dust of HMS Black Joke ) or is so
else’s self, the places they created might be contested by those who felt their identity or sense of belonging in Australia to be challenged by them. Consequently, the narratives of place constructed by Irish and Scottish religious memory and practice were, like all others, multi-vocal. Despite their formative role in the replication of ethnic identity, they did not sustain single, essentialist meanings. They were
social behaviours, gender roles, cultural values and economic activities they encountered around them, as well as by their own memory and past experience. Or, to put it another way, in light of their diasporic roots and routes. While some emigrants may have viewed emigration as a conscious break with a past that, having offered them little, retained scant purchase on their allegiance, for others, colonial events and
accosted by a staff member in a red tie proffering a glossy map. Glance ahead: there are cloisters lined with the names of the dead; a still pond with an eternal flame burning at one end; gargoyles; yew trees. At the far end is the muted green dome of the ‘Hall of Memory’. Another red-clad attendant hovers by the doorway. Everywhere appears the injunction: Remember. Turn left, and walk through glass doors to a long, white entrance hall, where quotations in raised letters stare down from the walls: ‘Here Is Their Spirit
barely shaken the mud of the fields from their feet, and whom almost within living memory, are remembered as slaves … They are in no way like white people. Their mentality is as different to ours as their outward appearance. 46 (Original emphasis) The enemy, however, was also within, for black West Indians were
) expressed interest in appropriating it from Zimbabwe, ostensibly to facilitate its relocation to a more hospitable environment. According to Chief Siloka Mukuni, ‘Zambians have a great deal of affection for Livingstone’s memory, unlike the Zimbabweans . . . we have kept the name of Livingstone out of a deep respect’. 4 In the event, Zambians commissioned a new statue and