The white way of seeing
In many European cities today, colonial monuments continue to remind us of imperial rulers and those who profited from colonialism. In their text The white way of seeing (in German only), Sybille Bauriedl and Inken Carstensen-Egwuom provide an overview of some of these monuments. Written for Ulrike Bergermann, the text takes readers from Cape Town via Bristol to Hamburg and Flensburg, concluding with reflections on the ‘I am Queen Mary’ monument in Copenhagen. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff’s work, the authors define ‘the white way of seeing’ as both a way of seeing and a powerful infrastructure that brings Eurocentric perspectives to the fore. While colonial profiteers are remembered, colonial violence and resistance against it are not.
The romanticisation and glorification of enslavers, politicians who enabled colonialism, and profiteers of European tyranny is also always the subject of protest, as outlined by the authors in the text. Starting with ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ in Cape Town, they focus on the activist practice of toppling monuments, using the term ‘fallism’. While the demand ‘Colston must fall’ was implemented by protesters in Bristol in 2020 as part of a Black Lives Matter protest, the same demand for the removal of the statue of Otto von Bismarck in Hamburg has not been met. Using the example of Hamburg, Sybille Bauriedl and Inken Carstensen-Egwuom discuss urban memory politics and the state: ‘The redesign and contextualisation of colonial monuments often becomes a top-down affair controlled by white-dominated scientific, cultural, and political elites’. People of colour and civil society initiatives that have organised protests and dialogues for years are often absent from these processes. This raises the question of who should control decolonisation processes.
Removing colonial monuments is a step towards de-privileging white viewing habits by changing the places where colonial actors are commemorated in a self-evident and trivialising way, thus disrupting these habits. At the same time, cities are living archives of colonialism, even without monuments: street names, architecture and institutions are all permeated by colonial entanglements. The violence and resistance that accompanied colonialism are actively forgotten. Anti-colonial groups are also campaigning against this, trying to create spaces for commemorating these events. Using Flensburg and Copenhagen as examples, the authors demonstrate how memory culture is challenged and resistance fighters are honoured. In July 2019, a temporary installation in the form of an empty, white platform in Flensburg’s harbour basin drew attention to the lack of recognition of colonial exploitation in the city’s self-image as a rum and sugar town. In Copenhagen, artists La Vaughn Belle and Janette Ehlers created ‘I am Queen Mary’, a counter-narrative to Danish colonialism focusing on resistance and exploitation.