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https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474018796653
cultural geographies
2019, Vol. 26(1) 127 –131
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1474474018796653
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Confederate monuments and
the problem of forgetting
Benjamin Forest
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Juliet Johnson
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Abstract
Those advocating the removal of US Confederate monuments have generally relied on the claim
that because the ideas these monuments represent (i.e. White supremacy) have no legitimate
place in political discourse, the monuments should be removed from public space. While we share
this normative position, experiences while teaching our interdisciplinary undergraduate course
on Memory, Place, and Power forced us to interrogate our reflexive desire to ‘take ’em down’.
We learned that as scholars and practitioners, we must not only better explain and defend the
nature of the ‘forgetting’ that happens when we remove Confederate monuments but also put
our discussion of their fate into a broader international context, one that embraces a range of
alternatives beyond the stark choice of removal versus retention.
Keywords
confederate, forgetting, memorial, memory, monument, post-communist
Within the United States, conflicts over Confederate monuments and displays of the Confederate
battle flag have intensified since 2015, sparked by the campaign and subsequent election of US
President Donald Trump, as well as by a self-avowed White supremacist’s massacre of nine African
American churchgoers in Charleston in June 2015.1 In 2017, a neo-Nazi killed a counter-protester
at a Virginia demonstration against the proposed removal of statues of Confederate generals Robert
E. Lee and Thomas Jackson, and extremists issued death threats against contractors bidding for the
work to remove Confederate statues in New Orleans in 2017.
We, along with many of our colleagues, welcomed the widespread calls to remove these anach-
ronistic icons of White supremacy from US public space. Teaching our interdisciplinary
undergraduate course, Memory, Place, and Power, in 2018, however, forced us to interrogate our
Corresponding author:
Benjamin Forest, McGill University, Montreal, QC, H3A 0B9, Canada.
Email: benjamin.forest@mcgill.ca
796653CGJ0010.1177/1474474018796653cultural geographiesForest and Johnson
research-article2018
Cultural Geographies in Practice
128 cultural geographies 26(1)
reflexive desire to ‘take ’em down’.2 Our class begins with a theoretical introduction to lieux de
memoire, applies those theories to a North American context (including a discussion of Confederate
symbolism), and then explores ‘monumental politics’ in the post-communist world. Students in the
course are typically sensitive to issues of social justice, particularly those involving White suprem-
acy in the United States, and think of anti-racism as an ongoing political project. When we
addressed Confederate symbolism, students made it clear through their questions, comments, and
papers that they strongly favored removal. In contrast, our students generally view the Soviet era
as historically distant and have little emotional investment in the debates over post-communist
public space, which led to more wide-ranging discussions on how to deal with these politically and
ideologically fraught monuments.
As we reflected on the course at the end of the semester and engaged with presentations at the
2018 American Association of Geographers (AAG) meetings, we realized that as scholars, we
should both better explain and defend the nature of the ‘forgetting’ that happens when we remove
Confederate monuments as well as put the discussion into a broader international context that
embraces a range of alternatives beyond the stark choice of removal versus retention. While we
still believe that removing Confederate monuments is typically the best option, our pedagogical
experience has led us to think and talk differently about why this is the case and to recognize that
other strategies may also be effective in confronting these painful reminders of our troubled past
and present.
Ways of forgetting
Erecting Confederate monuments in the late-19th and early-20th centuries reinforced the so-called
‘Lost Cause’ myth of the Civil War promoted by former Confederates and sympathizers.3 This
mythic history views slavery as a benevolent system and argues that the Civil War was fought over
states’ rights. It presents Confederate leaders and soldiers as emblems of traditional codes of honor,
chivalry, and religiosity in their defensive struggle against northern aggression.
The kind of historical amnesia that shapes the Lost Cause myth is not unique to the Confederate
case.4 As we discuss in our class, although memory studies both inside and outside geography aver
that any act of memory requires an act of forgetting, this is often noted in passing and without
identifying what exactly it means to forget. For this reason, we assign an essay by memory scholar
Paul Connerton on the nature of forgetting. Furthermore, we encourage our students to think more
explicitly about what exactly is being forgotten, and why, when we make choices about historical
representations in public space.
Connerton distinguishes seven types of forgetting, including what he terms ‘repressive erasure’
and ‘prescriptive forgetting’.5 We found this distinction especially useful in eliciting more complex
discussion from students. Repressive erasure, according to Connerton, is the Orwellian re-writing
of history, exemplified by the Soviet practice of airbrushing figures out of photographs when they
fell from the Party’s favor. It is a top-down, imposed forgetting that serves the interests of the state
or a narrow group. This type of forgetting can never be acknowledged – it relies on and enforces
silence and conformity. Students tended to view many Soviet-era monuments as objectionable on
the grounds that they embodied such repressive erasure, while not making this connection with
Confederate monuments. Yet, framing the Lost Cause myth as a parallel example of repressive
erasure (White southern US elites eliminating central elements of the pre–Civil War South, and the
Civil War itself, from historical accounts and the symbolic landscape) reveals how Confederate
monuments are problematic not simply because they support White supremacy but also because
they represent an oppressive form of forgetting.
Forest and Johnson 129
The importance of the distinction between the content of a monument per se and the kind of
memory/forgetting it embodies became especially evident when our class compared Confederate
and Soviet monuments explicitly. While students appreciated the diverse strategies adopted by
post-communist societies for Soviet monuments, they found it more difficult to respond to
Confederate monument defenders who charged that removal would be ‘erasing history’. In his
condemnation of Confederate monument removal, for example, conservative scholar Victor Davis
Hanson employs the same referent as Connerton does when speaking of repressive erasure: the
Roman practice of damnatio memoriae (‘damnation of memory’).6 Defenders thus make a moral
argument that the historical record must not be altered to fit contemporary sensibilities. In this
interpretation, the symbolic landscape is a kind of historical archive from which items should never
be removed. Of course, the ‘archive’ of the Lost Cause landscape is anything but neutral, and this
interpretation ignores the power relations embedded in its original construction. Yet, in the absence
of an alternative theory of forgetting, opponents’ focus on monument removal (e.g. the ‘take ’em
down!’ movement) leaves open the charge of seeking to erase the past.7
Two events we addressed in class illustrated how superficially similar removals of Confederate
symbols actually invoked different principles of forgetting. We first discussed protestors’
impromptu demolition of a Confederate monument in Durham, North Carolina, as a normatively
satisfying but problematic model for decisions over the symbolic landscape.8 Such spontaneous
removals effectively grant any group or individual the right to erase lieux de memoire from public
space without democratic discussion or deliberation. We contrasted such monument destruction –
an act that cannot easily be undone – with Bree Newsome taking down the Confederate flag from
outside the South Carolina statehouse in June 2015. The flag removal was a temporary, calculated
act of protest intended to draw attention to the fraught history of the state’s decision to fly the flag
on the capitol site. In that sense, the removal was an act of remembering rather than forgetting.
Following Newsome’s protest and its public resonance, the South Carolina assembly voted to
remove the flag permanently and brought it down in a public ceremony in July 2015. Similarly, the
municipal governments of Charlottesville and New Orleans decided after public deliberation to
remove Confederate statues in 2017. Connerton’s work would characterize such deliberate actions
by elected representatives as prescriptive forgetting rather than as repressive erasure. Unlike the
silence surrounding repressive erasure, prescriptive forgetting is openly acknowledged and used in
post-conflict societies to stop cycles of injury and revenge. Talking about removal as prescriptive
forgetting provides a way for supporters to both acknowledge removal as a form of forgetting and
defend its moral legitimacy. While both forms of forgetting – prescriptive and repressive – may
involve the physical removal of monuments, prescriptive forgetting requires identifiable elected
officials to make this choice on behalf of the public following open discussion and deliberation.
Thus, the removal decisions in Charlottesville and New Orleans can be seen as deliberative choices
necessary for post-conflict reconciliation.
Exile and counter-monuments
Although removal can mean moving a monument to a different public location, physically destroy-
ing it, or placing the monument in a museum or in storage, Confederate monument opponents have
focused on the latter two options.9 Our course’s exploration of memory politics in the post-commu-
nist world showed students that elected leaders there employed a much wider variety of strategies
to deal with their problematic Soviet-era monuments. Two strategies of note involve exile and
erecting dialogic counter-monuments.
Exile acknowledges that place matters. For example, Soviet-era monuments in Moscow,
Budapest, and Lithuania were moved from public prominence in city centers to so-called statue
130 cultural geographies 26(1)
parks. The Moscow park de-politicizes Soviet-era monuments by treating them as objects of art,
Budapest’s Memento Park satirizes them, and Lithuania’s park uses the statues to speak directly to
Soviet-era repression.10 In all cases, however, the monuments’ exile represents a physical acknowl-
edgment of their problematic nature, one arguably all the more powerful because exile does not
render the past ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Instead, the moved monuments are constant reminders
of a painful history, albeit less centrally placed.
Transferring Soviet-era memorials to cemeteries represents another kind of exile. For example, in
Tallinn, Estonia, the government moved a Soviet World War Two memorial revered by the local
Russian population and reviled by ethnic Estonians to a nearby Soviet military cemetery. While
sparking international controversy and local demonstrations, this move preserved the statue as a lieu
de memoire for the Russian community while sending the clear message that its legitimacy lay as a
memorial to the dead rather than a monument to the war. Although the statue park approach has not
received much attention in the Confederate monument debate, jurisdictions including Lexington
(Kentucky) and Portsmouth and Norfolk (Virginia) have moved or proposed moving Confederate
statues from central public locations to local cemeteries to reconcile conflicting community demands.
A second post-communist strategy has been the construction of dialogic counter-monuments –
new monuments whose content and placement expressly intend to alter or challenge the meaning
of existing ones.11 For example, the Hungarian government placed a statue of Imre Nagy (Hungary’s
leader during the 1956 uprising) with his back turned to the Soviet Red Army Monument in
Budapest, while a Russian Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) installed a memorial to vic-
tims of political repression steps from the statue of Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinksii
in central Moscow.12
These strategies are more difficult to characterize as ‘erasing history’ because elements are
added to rather than removed from the symbolic landscape. At the same time, they clearly alter the
original monuments’ intended meaning. One could imagine, for example, a powerful and physi-
cally imposing anti-slavery memorial facing off with prominent Confederate monuments.13
Although some Confederate monuments have had informational plaques installed to provide his-
torical context, our students observed that this practice represents a much more minimalist, even
unobtrusive response.14 Reflecting on the bolder and broader range of post-communist strategies
with our class, we realized that advocates for removal should defend this choice not just in contrast
to retention but with other potentially meaningful and effective options.
Concluding thoughts
Talking about Confederate symbolism with students who both are deeply aware of structural rac-
ism and often define their own national identity in opposition to the United States risks ‘playing to
the crowd’. In this context, the removal of Confederate statues seems so self-evidently correct that
we had to remind ourselves that whatever the justification, any act of removal can be seen as an act
of forgetting. Making an explicit comparison between the fates of Confederate and Soviet-era
symbols provided students (and ourselves) with a productive way to open up and enrich our discus-
sions on how to deal with such ‘monumental’ problems.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Benjamin Forest https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4831-9403
Forest and Johnson 131
Notes
1. An earlier version of this essay was presented in a 2018 AAG meeting session in New Orleans titled,
‘Placing’ the Confederacy: Constructing, Removing, and Renaming Confederate Monuments in the
South and Beyond, organized by Rebecca Sheehan and Jennifer Speights-Binet. It included presenta-
tions by the organizers, Jonathan Leib, Helen A. Regis, and Richard Schein.
2. The course is cross-listed between geography and political science, and the first and second authors
hold appointments in those departments, respectively. The syllabus can be found at www.mcgill.ca/
geography/courses.
3. G.W.Gallagher and A.T.Nolan, The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2000), H.E.Gulley, ‘Women and the Lost Cause: Preserving a Confederate Identity in
the American Deep South’, Journal of Historical Geography 19 (1993), pp. 125–41. Southern Poverty
Law Center, Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy (Montgomery and Alabama: Southern
Poverty Law Center, 2016).
4. D.Lowenthal, ‘Benefits and Burdens of the Past’, in D.Lowenthal (ed.), The Past Is a Foreign Country
– Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 80–144.
5. P.Connerton, ‘Seven types of forgetting’, Memory Studies 1, pp. 59–71. DOI: 10.1177/1750698007083889.
6. V.D.Hanson, ‘Our War Against Memory’, National Review <www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/eras-
ing-history-censoring-confederate-past-rewriting-memory-mob-vengeance/> (22 August 2017).
7. For example, Take ’Em Down New Orleans <http://takeemdownnola.org> seeks to remove all symbols
of White supremacy, including monuments, memorials, and honorific place names. ‘Take ’Em Down’
groups have been organized in other cities as well.
8. M.Astor, ‘Protesters in Durham Topple a Confederate Monument’, New York Times <www.nytimes.
com/2017/08/14/us/protesters-in-durham-topple-a-confederate-monument.html> (14 August 2017).
9. Opponents often propose transferring monuments to museums without considering whether museums
would be interested in or able to deal with them. J.Bryant, B.Filene, L.Nelson, J.Scott and S.Seriff, ‘Are
Museums the Right Home for Confederate Monuments?’ Smithsonian.com <https://www.smithsonian-
mag.com/history/are-museums-right-home-confederate-monuments-180968969/>(7 May 2018).
10. B.Forest and J.Johnson, ‘Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet
National Identity in Moscow’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 (2002),
pp. 524–47.
11. Q.Stevens, K.A.Franck and R.Fazakerley, ‘Counter-Monuments: The Anti-Monumental and the
Dialogic’, The Journal of Architecture 17 (2012), pp. 951–72.
12. The Dzerzhinskii statue was subsequently moved to Moscow’s nascent statue park in August 1991.
13. A parallel exists in the earlier placement of an Arthur Ashe statue near Confederate monuments in
Richmond, Virginia, although it does not overtly challenge the others in the same way as the post-
communist examples. J.Leib, ‘Separate Times, Shared Spaces: Arthur Ashe, Monument Avenue and the
Politics of Richmond, Virginia’s Symbolic Landscape’, cultural geographies 9 (2002), pp. 286–312.
14. B.Katz, ‘New Historic Marker Highlights Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Ties to the Slave Trade’, Smithsonian.
com <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-historic-marker-highlights-nathan-bedford-
forrests-ties-slave-trade-180968419/>(18 March 2018).
Author biographies
Benjamin Forest is an associate professor of Geography, an Associate Member of the Department of Political
Science, and a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship at McGill University. His cur-
rent research examines the political representation of ethnic minority groups and women, the use of monu-
ments and memorials for (re)constructing post-Soviet national identities, and various issues of electoral geog-
raphy, political parties, and governance.
Juliet Johnson is professor and Chair of Political Science at McGill University, as well as director of the Jean
Monnet Network Between the EU and Russia: Domains of Diversity and Contestation (the BEAR network).
Her research focuses on the politics of money, memory, and identity.
