Politics of the Past: Monuments and Social Conflict from the Ancient World to Modern New Orleans

Catalog description

This course addresses the impact of monuments, historical and archaeological sites, and cultural heritage management on local communities and the ethical and political dimensions of ongoing conservation, museum, and research projects. Recent protests over cultural heritage sites in places like Mexico, Turkey, and Jerusalem, the dramatic destruction of monuments at the hands of ISIS in Syria, and our own domestic debates about the Confederate monuments that dot many American cities have shown the potential for monuments to be at the center of complex political, ethnic, and religious controversies or to even become a sites of conflict and violence. The course will explore the use and abuse of material culture as a means of underpinning modern claims of nation and statehood and cultural superiority. At the same time, debates over monuments and historical sites provide a unique opportunity to give a voice to groups that fall outside of traditional historical sources, and it can provide a powerful means of opening dialogue about the past. Throughout the course, we will discuss the roles and responsibilities of governments, international organizations, museums, auction houses and galleries, private collectors, and tourism in the exploitation, preservation, and presentation of monuments and material culture. Students will put the historical perspectives of the course into practice by a series of field trips to public and private museums and historical sites in and around New Orleans, and they will address how our own contemporary debates might be informed by wider attention to historical and global issues of cultural heritage management.