Interview byElias Feroz

After years of heated debates over statues, museums, and so-called “cancel culture,” the fight over memory and heritage shows no sign of slowing down. Across the world, monuments that once seemed immovable have been toppled, renamed, or removed. In South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, statues of the Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes have already fallen; in Britain, the name of the Sackler family has been stripped from museum galleries, while the Benin Bronzes are finally being returned. Yet each act of change has been met with fierce backlash — accusations of “erasing history,” fears of a slippery slope, and the familiar refrain that culture is under attack.

For Dan Hicks, a professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford and curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, these struggles are not mere “culture wars” but about the weaponization of culture itself. His latest book, Every Monument Will Fall, traces the deep colonial roots of museums, monuments, and memory politics. It exposes how supremacist ideologies were built into the architecture of our cultural institutions — even in grotesque objects like a ceremonial skull cup kept at Oxford University’s Worcester College.

Speaking to Elias Feroz in an interview for Jacobin, Hicks reflects on the colonial origins of British heritage, the politics of naming and un-naming, and why dismantling these inherited structures of power should not be seen in terms of “destruction.”

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Elias Feroz

In recent years — sparked, for example, by Black Lives Matter — there has been a strong focus on monuments. Why do you think monuments have become so central in these debates?

Dan Hicks

You’re certainly right that we’re often told that campaigns to topple statues are a recent phenomenon. But in fact, Fallism is a political movement with a long history. For example, 2027 will mark the hundred-year anniversary of the Neill Statue Satyagraha protest in Chennai, which led to the removal of a statue of the British East India Company officer James Neill, the so-called butcher of Allahabad who oversaw the campaign of brutal reprisals after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Scores of indigenous- and African-led movements have removed statues of imperial heroes, colonizers, and enslavers, from Algeria and Australia to the Caribbean; and scores more are still the subject of demands for removals. In the United States, taking down Confederate statues has been a key part of the civil rights movement since the 1960s, and the landmark publication of the All Monuments Must Fall syllabus in 2017 took this movement to another level.

Meanwhile at my own institution, Oxford University, the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes is entering its second decade. Statues of Rhodes have fallen before: in Lusaka in 1964, Bulawayo in 1980, and Cape Town in 2015. But it’s the unfallen status of Oxford’s Rhodes statue — despite the democratic decision of the college’s governing body to take it down in 2020, reaffirmed in 2021 — that made the writing of this book both possible and necessary.

What unites these various Fallism movements is an insistence that public art can operate as a technology or infrastructure for colonialism. It turns out that things an older classical Marxism might’ve classified as “superstructural” can be building blocks for cultural supremacism. In Every Monument Will Fall, I trace how much of that global infrastructure was built in a surprisingly tight time frame, between say the 1870s and the 1920s. Images of domination were hardwired into the built environment, what in the jargon of an older generation of Marxist thought we used to call “naturalization,” as if those images were normal, eternal, and invincible, as if they represented an unshakable reality. To make images of colonizers and enslavers last, in other words. The book offers a name for this latent, proto-fascist, worldwide movement of art, culture and ideas: “militarist realism.”

Acts of naming play an important role in the book: who or what gets named, and who or what doesn’t, and the radical potential of renaming or un-naming. Dismantling or reconfiguring this infrastructure can bring a remaking of collective memory, opening up space for other kinds of remembrance, other people remembered. When the idea of “memory culture” is expanded from the legacies of fascism to the wider cultural legacies of extractivist colonialism and racial capitalism, new forms of monumentality begin to emerge, hand in hand with new acts of remembrance and imagination.

This book is itself, in part, an act of remembrance, a small counter-monument in the face of colonial legacies in the museums, universities, and streets. These legacies are far from behind us. In some places they are being reactivated before our very eyes.

Elias Feroz

You describe museums and disciplines like archaeology as having functioned as instruments of colonial domination — even as weapons. In recent years, restitution has entered the mainstream discourse. But has this shift gone beyond symbolic gestures?

Dan Hicks

Every Monument Will Fall examines the commonalities and connections between three long-standing indigenous- and Africa-led grassroots movements: restitution for stolen art and artifacts, fallism for statues, and the decolonization of academic disciplines. Whether focused on objects in the glass cases of the museum, monuments in the streets, or books on the shelves of the university library, these parallel efforts are concerned with returning, unbuilding, and unlearning legacy colonialism.

In part, monuments, museums, and academic subjects are concerned with representation. But they are also durational technologies. I mean, they don’t just paint a picture; they make an image last. And just as the afterimage of an explosion might keep flashing on your retina, the visual regimes of art and culture can be used to make dispossession, debt, or prejudice endure.

It’s been great to see this latest phase in the long history of restitution. In my book *The Brutish Museums, *I predicted the 2020s would be a “decade of returns,” and today, halfway through that time frame, that still sounds like a reasonable description. But returns can be reduced to empty gestures, or to geopolitics and soft diplomacy of the [Emmanuel] Macron variety, if they’re not embedded in the wider political task of disassembling these tacit, implicit, legacy infrastructures of racism. Restitution isn’t about undoing the past. It’s about pushing for full 100 percent transparency about what’s in the collections, about giving back objects or human remains when asked, and above all about what happens next. Museums were just one of several civic spheres in which art and culture were weaponized.

That’s why in Every Monument Will Fall, I argue that “this has to be about more than returning the Benin bronzes.” There are still millions of museum objects that aren’t even on a public database. Uncounted hundreds of thousands of skulls and body parts of people’s ancestors. Hundreds of unfinished campaigns for removing racist statues. Museumgoers, descendant communities, and stakeholders of all kinds are demanding to be told what’s warehoused in the museum stores. Citizens are demanding a memory culture that’s in step with their times. We’re just at the beginning of where this leads. But I’ve never seen such a seismic shift in public historical consciousness in my lifetime, as the racism, colonial violence, and dispossession of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries come into view.

Elias Feroz

*Every Monument Will Fall *tells the grotesque story of a human skull turned into a drinking vessel. This raises a broader ethical question: When we talk about human rights, we usually refer to the rights and dignity of the living. But don’t the dead also deserve dignity?

Dan Hicks

There are two very different kinds of monumentality at play here. The book traces how they have unfolded in real time. On the one hand, there are the dead white men whose memory is preserved for posterity with a bronze or marble figure on a plinth or a name above a door. On the other hand, there are the people who are not just forgotten but whose existence has been actively diminished, silenced, erased, redacted, dehumanized even.

The book pieces together the untold history of how a woman’s skull was turned into a kind of chalice and ended up being used to drink out of at Oxford college dinners. When the wear and tear got so much that it leaked, they used it to serve the chocolates — until as recently as 2015. For years it was a sort of open secret at the university. Many find that shocking and disturbing, myself included.

The story is that she was a Caribbean enslaved woman, and the book examines what can and can’t be ascertained about her life. What’s certain is that her memory was not venerated with a statue; instead, her anonymized body was posthumously abused. Indeed, part of the violence took the form of the destruction of her identity, and that violence is also seen in countless numbers of human remains still held in museum collections. In slowly reconstructing the story, the book tells a history of humanization and dehumanization, subjectification and objectification.

The aim isn’t just to consider how such an obscene tradition could become established (in this case as recently as 1946), but to ask how it is made to endure. The ways in which such endurances happen take many different forms. I talk about the old Althusserian idea of “interpellation” to try to understand the role of personal participation and training.

The skull was donated to the college by the fascist eugenicist grandson of the man who founded the museum I work in, General Pitt-Rivers. The grandfather had purchased it in 1884 at Sotheby’s. In 2025 in the UK, buying and selling human remains is still entirely legal. The sale of ivory has been outlawed, but if the soldier-anthropologist Pitt-Rivers were alive today, he could still purchase a human skull at an auction. In the UK in March 2025, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations and Restitution, chaired by Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, published an important report about human remains called Laying Ancestors to Rest. The report makes fourteen recommendations, including a ban on both the sale and the public display of ancestral remains.

Every Monument Will Fall looks outward from the story of the skull cup to these issues of policy and practice, from outlawing the sale of human skulls to the ethical, cultural, and historical treatment of ancestral remains in museums and universities. How near are you right this moment from one of those cardboard boxes in some museum storeroom containing human remains? Is there a descendant somewhere who would wish the remains to be returned? And if the violence was such that any knowledge of who that person was, where they lived, or what their name was has been destroyed, what should be done now with the skulls, bones, hair, skin, teeth, or nails? And what of objects or artworks understood to constitute ancestors because of their sacred or royal status? These are questions of monumentality too. Inaction can be one way the brutality endures.

I learned a great deal from the work of Sylvia Wynter when looking at these questions — particularly her 1994 essay, No Humans Involved. Wynter explains how this phrase was used as a code by the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1990s, indicating incidents in which no white people were involved. Her account of “liberal monohumanism” offers a crucial frame for the history of who has counted as “human,” questioning what this reveals about the category of “man” and the ideas of “the human” itself. These questions have never been more urgent for the bundle of historically interconnected fields across which the book operates, which I call the “four As”: anthropology, archaeology, art, architecture. And also for what I’ve come to call the “four Ms”: museums, memory, monumentality, militarism.

Elias Feroz

You write about how monuments, museums, and universities were instrumentalized to create this image of “militarist realism.” What parallels would you draw with the so-called “culture war” today?

Dan Hicks

The story of the co-option of natural history to try to naturalize inequality — through the fake “racial science” of the 1850s — is well known. Less attention has been paid to the co-option of cultural history in the subsequent decades for the very same purpose. The double-nexus of disciplines and institutions that I’m calling the “four As” and the “four Ms” is where this cultural racism was disciplinized and institutionalized. Images of “barbarism” and “savagery” in the museums came hand in hand with contrasts between “primitive” cultures and “civilization” in the textbooks, and figures of strength and victory in public art. The legacies of that history are still with us in so many ways.

Sometimes the implication was a justification of colonial war. For example, the book describes the British use of machine guns at the Battle of Ulundi in 1879 through the lens of anthropological theories of technological supremacism. I question the return of the idea of the “nonhuman” in material culture studies and actor-network theory. The figure of the “nonhuman” has a history, one that’s often troubling.

At other times the concern was with rewiring cultures of remembrance, for example in the monuments to the so-called “Lost Cause” that were built after the American Civil War — as if that war were not over, to keep the victory unceded. I describe how as early as 1870, Frederick Douglass predicted that such monuments would perpetuate the warped memory of the Lost Cause, and thus “reawaken the conflict, by cultivating hatred.” Ninety years later when Frantz Fanon described colonialism as “a world of statues,” he was pointing to a violent imperialistic ideology that insists on a culture of memory that’s fixed and immutable. Today you see that impulse not just in people trying to oppose the removal of a racist statue, but also in oppositions to returning stolen objects or even to simply updating a university curriculum — as if culture and knowledge should be frozen, deadened, preserved in amber.

There are strong parallels with America under Donald Trump’s second term of course, from the statues being commissioned for the new National Garden of American Heroes to the new round of attacks on universities and museums. I make the point in the book that when people talk about a “culture war” what they’re really describing is the old war on culture, the weaponization of culture, an attack on institutions like museums and universities — an attack that has always presented itself as a defense. That military strategy has a history. *Every Monument Will Fall *offers a history of the right’s war on culture.

Elias Feroz

You define “militarist realism” as the colonial condition in which it becomes impossible to imagine the world otherwise. Could you expand on how this imaginative containment works?

Dan Hicks

We all recognize the aesthetic when we see it: a looted object in a glass box, a statue glorifying a general on his horse, or colonialist disciplines like archaeology and anthropology with their universalist claim to describe the whole of the human past and every form of culture on the planet. I offer the name “militarist realism” for this artistic, intellectual, and supremacist movement that we currently don’t have a name for.

It’s “realism” in the sense used by the late great Mark Fisher when he wrote about “capitalist realism” — the way that this seems to be the only way things could be, as if nothing could ever be otherwise. And it’s “militarist” in that it’s embedded in the naturalization of the ultraviolence of the unfinished wars of corporate-colonialism.

Militarist realism is like a psy-op. It confuses the viewer in two ways. First, it makes you mistake the monument for the man. A community starts talking about removing the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol or Cecil Rhodes in Oxford and before you know it someone has come up with a balance sheet outlining the rights and wrongs of this historical figure. It’s complicated, they say. Entangled. Don’t judge the past by the values of the present. Don’t cancel him. “Retain and explain,” that’s the slogan.

Before you know it, someone’s stuck up a little sign cataloguing the pros and cons of the man’s actions, achievements, charitable donations, and general moral character. But it was never about the person. It was always about a statue of a person, or some letters on a wall. And here the second confusion comes into play.

Militarist realism tricks you into mistaking memory for history. The militarist realists tried to force their own memories onto the future, which is now our present. The upshot is that our towns and cities, museums and academic disciplines suffer from a peculiar and extreme case of involuntary memory. In Every Monument Will Fall, I make the case that any community or society must have a democratic right to shape and reshape its own memory culture, to choose whom it wishes to commemorate, to renew cultures of remembrance, and to reimagine forms of monumentality.

One example I discuss toward the end of the book is from the London Museum Docklands. A statue of an enslaver was erected on West India Docks in 1809, removed during the war in 1942, reinstalled in 1997, protested from the moment the museum opened in 2003, and finally taken down again in 2020 and put in a storeroom. In place of that statue, a new monument has been commissioned — a cowrie-shell sculpture called The Wake by artist Khaleb Brooks with poetry by Yrsa Daley-Ward. A monument that honored the perpetrator is being replaced by one that remembers the survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. It’s a powerful instance of how memory culture can shift, flip, and evolve, shaped by public demands.

Militarist realism persists not just as physical infrastructure but also as the idea that nothing can ever change. The world is always changing, of course, things get preserved or torn down or rebuilt all the time. So this is about how a society makes choices about what it keeps and what it doesn’t from the past and about who makes those choices. That’s why the book isn’t called All the Monuments Must Fall but Every Monument Will Fall.

Without active preservation, things will decay and fragment. So the book calls for a democratization of the processes through which decisions are made about what’s kept and what’s let go of. It makes the case for returning to what used to be called “value-led” heritage management, rebuilding a cultural sector that cares for people more than it does for things.

Elias Feroz

You cite Simon Harrison’s work showing that the mutilation of enemy bodies — the taking of ears, teeth, bone — occurred specifically in colonial wars and not in European conflicts like Crimea or the Napoleonic Wars. What does this reveal about the racial logic underpinning colonial warfare, and how do such practices continue to shape the way we remember imperial violence today?

Dan Hicks

Around the world a radical change has been unfolding in collective historical consciousness over the past decade or so. Long-standing attempts to suppress the memory of the racist and colonial violence of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have started to fail, and with them the visual regimes of monuments that told the same old tired, whitewashed story. The return of the Benin Bronzes is one example of the consequences of this failure. People are connecting the dots between art, culture, ideologies built to justify imperial slaughter, and racism in the contemporary world.

In the book, I talk not just about looted artefacts but also about the body horror of the taking of skulls from the battlefield by British military officers. Among these is a story about Field Marshal Lord Grenfell returning to the battlefield at Ulundi, digging up the skull of the Xhosa chief Sandile, and keeping it as a memento on the mantelpiece of his Gloucestershire manor house. That’s the same man that Grenfell Tower was named after.

The violence persists in so many complex ways. I talk about the debates in Britain over institutional racism after the 1999 report on the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, and I point out the historical connections with Euro-American ideologies of “extermination” in the nineteenth century, which presented killings, massacres, and military expeditions as if they were merely inevitable processes. It’s the beginning of ideas of manifest destiny really, and anthropology and museums played a key role.

Thirty years ago, academics were still talking about “postcolonial studies.” Today just open a newspaper or doomscroll your social media and you’ll see colonial wars and settler violence persisting, and the old pretense that killings are merely “deaths” right there in the headlines. Again, names and naming are important. New vocabularies are emerging to discuss these enduring, evolving colonial forms: extractivism, carcerality, racial capitalism, and so on. We need these new vocabularies.

In The British Museums, I offered “necrography” (“death-writing”). In Every Monument Will Fall, I offer “militarist realism,” and I also experiment with ways of writing so as not to endlessly repeat the names of dead white soldiers, curators, or collectors and thus endlessly re-center them. When you hear people talking about colonialism, the focus is often only on settler colonialism; but hand in hand with the theft of land there was always the theft of lives, living bodies, dead bodies, art, culture, and knowledge.

Ultimately the message of the book is one of hope. It can take a long time for these structures and infrastructures to be dismantled. Returning looted objects, removing racist statues, or changing academic disciplines doesn’t happen overnight. Militarist realism won’t be unbuilt in a day. These are intergenerational projects. It can take decades for returns to be made or for one particular statue to fall. Because of course it’s hard to recognize when art and culture are hurtful. It takes time dis-embed something hardwired into an invented tradition or a gallery.

When the statue of the enslaver Colston was removed in Bristol in 2020, the campaign had begun over a quarter of a century before. It’s the same with Mohrenstraße in Berlin, eventually renamed Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße in August 2025 after a thirty-year struggle, changing a name many found dehumanizing and racist into a memorial for an eighteenth-century black philosopher. Eventually, once an old, outdated form of memory culture and monumentality starts to crack and fall apart, change comes. Just don’t give up.

Elias Feroz

You describe how monumentality isn’t only physical — it also takes linguistic forms: in euphemisms, passive constructions, and the selective use of names. What role does language play in sustaining or resisting colonial memory structures?

Dan Hicks

Pronouns are really important, of course. Think, for example, of how the “he” and the “it” are mixed up when people talk about a statue of a colonizer. The first person can center the speaker, and when it turns into a “we” then the question must be who’s being included or excluded, who’s invited when there’s a discussion about “our heritage.” Museums or academic disciplines that seem to encompass the whole world can operate to keep certain people out.

With these things in mind, the book ended up using the second person quite a lot, using the vocative or invocative voice. The “you” refers to lots of people who were involved in the book being written, including my late friend and colleague Mary Beaudry of Boston University, to whom the book is dedicated. But I hope the “you” helps to decenter my own voice too, and that by the end of the book it might even include the reader too.

Attending to the style, tone, and modes of writing about colonialism and racism is very important to me. So are citation practices; citation is, after all, a form of memory. The “critical fabulation” of Saidiya Hartman has been a great inspiration for many, myself included, for pushing the boundaries on this question. I have also learned from how the artist Isaac Julien, with whom I worked on his last film, crafts narrative to reveal the fault lines between truth and fiction. There’s probably more Maggie Nelson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Roland Barthes in this book than you might expect too, and the argument relies a lot on Stuart Hall, Christina Sharpe, Aimé Césaire, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and, above all, Sylvia Wynter, as I mentioned before. Reading and finding inspiration beyond the silos of legacy colonial disciplines must be part of anti-colonialism.

The hard right’s culture warriors will always try to create moral panic to get others to stop progressive change in museums, monuments, and universities — because they appreciate how important art, culture, and memory are for society. Those on the Left need to hold onto that appreciation too. Demand the democratic right to reshape memory cultures: how, what, and whom a society or a community chooses to remember. That’s how we can collectively bring the infinity war on culture to an end.