Memorials to settler-colonialism in Australia: racism, colonialism and white power

This chapter is based on a post-colonial reading of contemporary politics and an appreciation of the long struggle against colonialism that can be traced back centuries. It contextualises the current ‘colonial memorialisation’ struggle as a component of that larger struggle, which is evident to me will continue for as long as the colonial political, economic and cultural order (i.e., imperial order) remains in place. Informed by my reading of the past, and a capacity to identify the ways the past continues to exist in the present, this chapter analyses the global memorialisation of colonisers and colonialism. The memorials discussed in this chapter include statues, flags, place and building names and dates of commemoration, beginning in 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall movement. It is argued that the monuments and memorials to colonialism and the colonisers cannot be separated from the broader politics of economic inequality, challenges to white privilege and the (re)resurgence of right-wing politics and militant nationalism. This chapter reveals how the contemporary world order relies heavily on the racist cultural order constructed in a period of Empire and then provides a contemporary exposé of the ways that the efforts to challenge the racist cultural order by movements such as #RhodesMustFall are a threat to the prevailing and dominant political and economic system. The struggle to bring down monuments dedicated to colonialism and imperialism is intertwined with continuing unequal political and economic structures. It is in the recognition that racism and capitalism are inextricably connected (Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, The University of North Carolina Press, 1944) and that the capitalist system requires a racist (and misogynist) order for its survival that the full implications of the challenge to colonial memorialisation are located.