Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade

How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignoring monuments for years, why must we now commemorate public trauma, but not triumph, with a monument? To explore these and other questions, Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin assembled essays from leading scholars about how monuments have functioned throughout the world and how globalization has challenged Western notions of the "monument."

Examining how monuments preserve memory, these essays demonstrate how phenomena as diverse as ancient drum towers in China and ritual whale-killings in the Pacific Northwest serve to represent and negotiate time. Connecting that history to the present with an epilogue on the World Trade Center, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade is pertinent not only for art historians but for anyone interested in the turbulent history of monuments—a history that is still very much with us today.

Contributors:
Stephen Bann, Jonathan Bordo, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jas Elsner, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, Ruth B. Phillips, Mitchell Schwarzer, Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Richard Wittman, Wu Hung

Robert S. Nelson is a Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the History of Culture, and chair of the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. He is the editor of Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw and coeditor of Critical Terms for Art History, second edition, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

Margaret Olin is a professor of art history, theory, and criticism, and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art.