Contested Urban Spaces

Ulrike Capdepón is a researcher at the Center for Cultural Inquiry, University of Konstanz, Germany, and will be a DAAD-Professor at the CUCSH of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests include memory studies and human rights in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.

Sarah Dornhof is a research fellow at the Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. Her current research examines contemporary art in relation to cultural memory and archival practice in Morocco. Her fields of interest are postcolonial and gender studies.

This book takes the urban space as a starting point for thinking about practices, actors, narratives, and imaginations within articulations of memory. The social protests and mobilizations against colonial statues are examples of how past injustice and violence keep on shaping debates in the present. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the contributions to this book focus on the in/visibility and affective power of monuments and traces through political, activist, and artistic contestations in different geographical settings. They show that memories are shaped in contact zones, most often in conflict and within hierarchical social relations. The notion of decentered memory shifts the perspective to relationships between imperial centers and margins, remembrance and erasure, nationalistic tendencies and migration. This plurality of connections emerges around unfinished histories of violence and resistance that are reflected in monuments and traces.

Contributes to debates about contested monuments and the (re)negotiation of past and present violence

Chapter 1: Introduction: Contested Memory in Urban Space.- Part I: Approaching contested urban memoryscapes.- Chapter 2: (In)visibile Monuments. What Makes Monuments Controversial?.- Chapter 3: Australian Welcome Walls and Other Sites of Networked Migrant Memory.- Chapter 4: Negotiating binaries in curatorial practice: modality, temporality, and materiality in Cape Town's community-led urban history museums.- Chapter 5: Contesting Sensory Memories: Smithfield Market in London.- Part II: Decentered Memories.- Chapter 6: Across the Atlantic. Silences and Memories of Nazism in Remote Lands (Eldorado, Misiones).- Chapter 7: [De]colonial Memory Practices in Germany's Public Space.- Chapter 8: Splinters between Memory and Globalization: Cosmic Generator Installation by Mika Rottenberg in Münster at Skulptur Projekte 2017.- Part III: Fallen Monuments.- Chapter 9: The Empty Pedestal: Artistic Practice and Public Space in Luanda.- Chapter 10: They Took Him Away but It Was Like He Was StillAround: Can New York City Move Beyond the Legacy of J. Marion Sims?.- Chapter 11: Disgraced Monuments: Burying and Unearthing Lenin and Lyautey.- Part IV: Traces of Violence.- Chapter 12: Urban Memory after War: Ruins and reconstructions in post-Yugoslav cities.- Chapter 13: Monumentality, Forensic Practices, and the Representation of the Dead: the Debate about the Memory of the Post-Civil War Victims in the Almudena Cemetery, Madrid.- Chapter 14: The Mass Grave and the Memorial. Notes from Mexico on Memory Work as Contestation of Contemporary Terror.