Monumental Debates and Racial Reckoning on the Symbolic Landscape at Colleges and Universities in the United States

Debates on symbolic landscapes at institutions of higher learning in the United States have foregrounded the persistence of politically fraught public works of art that promoted and perpetuated racist depictions and narratives. Student and community activists alerted their communities to monuments associated with Lost Cause ideals, historical figures that espoused or benefitted from the institution of slavery and works that reinforced racist hierarchies. Since 2018, when protesters at the University of South Carolina at Chapel Hill toppled the statue of Silent Sam, institutions across the South and the North removed offensive and injurious markers and monuments and have renamed buildings honoring morally contemptible individuals, though not without opposition.

Concurrently, institutions have enriched multivocal communal spaces with new monuments that address historical exclusions and seek to create more equitable and inclusive public spaces. In 2017, the University of Texas at Austin removed its expansive monumental program to actors of the Confederacy and supporters of slavery, and in 2021, it installed Simone Leigh’s Sentinel IV, addressing the diasporic labor of Black women. The confrontations surrounding the removal of Ann Rice O’Hanlon’s New Deal mural at the University of Kentucky, opposed even by Karyn Olivier whose 2018 work entitled Witness dialogued with O’Hanlon’s work, are indicative of the complex negotiations occurring on college campuses. This panel seeks papers that explore controversies and debates over problematic monumental landscapes on university and college grounds or that foreground the didactic possibilities of new monumental undertakings in these spaces that strive for historical and racial reckoning.