Workshop: “Performing Monuments: Brewing and the Politics of Racial Reckoning”

Danielle Roper

University Club, Room 313
@ 12:00 pm
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This essay examines the function of monuments amid ongoing calls for reparations in the Caribbean and its diasporas.  It analyzes I am Queen Mary, a monument created by La Vaughn Belle, an Afro-Crucian artist of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Jeanette Ehlers, an Afro-Danish artist that was unveiled in Copenhagen in 2018. Juxtaposed with other artistic interventions in monuments in the Caribbean and its diasporas, I locate this artwork in relation to debates surrounding the role of monuments in histories of colonialism and slavery. I not only attend to the function of monuments within the politics of racial reckoning, but I also assess their place within the struggles for reparatory justice.