Architectures of Pain

Racism and Monuments Removal Activism in the "New" New Orleans

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2263158
AutoresAna Croegaert (0000-0003-2463-7711, The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago)
Año2020
Volumen32
Número3
Páginas579-602
Fecha de publicación2020-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCity & Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0893-0465 • E-ISSN: 1548-744X
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/ciso.12339
OpenAlexW3087634290
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas28

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 transnational 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. I argue that the city administration's framing of the monuments as emblems of an unequal past decouples the monuments' removal from the urgent need to meaningfully address present inequalities. While clearing the cityscape of these four monuments makes neighborhoods more palatable to residents who oppose overt symbols of white supremacy, it may also paradoxically contribute to gentrified redevelopment that displaces predominantly non-white poor and working-class residents

Geographies of human-animal interactions · Public Spaces through Art · Urban Planning and Governance