(CS4.3) Colonial Idols and Criminal Effigies: Iconoclasm in twenty-first-century Canada

In July 2018, photographs of the gibbeted bronze statue of John A. Macdonald in Victoria, British Columbia, swaddled in blankets and loaded onto a truck destined for an undisclosed location, generated a polarized national dialogue about commemoration, history, memory, and reconciliation. In other parts of Canada, municipal task forces composed of historians, heritage experts, and representatives from First Nations were assembled to judge the appropriateness of public statues that represent the men responsible for orchestrating the genocide of Indigenous people in Canada. While the task forces proceeded at the slow pace of municipal bureaucracy, activists doused these statues in red paint and spray painted “murderer” and “colonizer” on their plinths. In August 2020, fueled by similar acts in the United Kingdom and the United States, anti-racist activists in Montreal tied ropes around a towering bronze statue of John A. Macdonald and brought it crashing to the ground. While government administered removal and removal through direction action employ radically different strategies, they share a common goal: the alteration of the material memoryscape.

For many Canadians, the bronze and stone statues that stand and sit in urban landscapes across Canada fade into the backdrop of the built environment. Described by Grant and Stanley as the “wallpaper of dominance,” these silent custodians of state-sanctioned national history
discreetly buttress a national identity propagated through a contrived story of shared historical experience. However, in Canada, the Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, and Land Back movements, combined with efforts towards Settler-Indigenous Reconciliation, have prompted the reappraisal of the Canadian nationalist historical narrative of colonization. This reappraisal has created rips in the wallpaper, most tangibly expressed by nation-wide efforts to revise the commemorative landscape through the removal of monuments that misrepresent colonial history and actively harm survivors of colonialism. To peer through these rips, it is necessary to take account of the deeply sedimented historical genres of engagement, the immediate visceral elements at play in the monumental encounter, and the iconoclastic precedents and traditions that animate anti-colonial iconoclasm in Canada. Historical context can provide valuable insight about why we dismantle monuments and how iconoclasm functions to convey political messages, protest inequity, and achieve symbolic justice.

This talk will interrogate the role of iconoclasm in reshaping Canada’s colonial historical narrative by exploring how the historic iconoclastic practices of memory sanction and effigy punishment are being deployed to remove colonial statues in twenty-first-century Canada. Analysis of both the historical and contemporary incarnations of these practices can elucidate the historical, social and political motivations of anti-colonial iconoclasm. Fundamentally, this talk aims to complicate the debate about commemoration in Canada by exploring the complex historical, material, and affective dimensions of the human-monument relationship.