- Title
- Contemporary Indigenous iconoclasm in global perspective: contested monuments in three settler colonies, c. 1968–2000
- Creator
- Orr, Nikolas
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2024
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Action against monuments celebrating colonialism and slavery occurring across the world since 2015 in association with the Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements has been widely construed by activists, politicians, media commentators, and scholars as an unprecedented wave of global iconoclasm. This thesis challenges its purported novelty by revealing the importance of monument activism in the anticolonial struggles of First Peoples in the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand from the 1970s to the 1990s, a period in which Indigenous groups globally challenged post-Second World War geostrategy which brokered the self-determination of former European colonies while passing over the internally colonised peoples of settler-colonial nations. Through a wide-spanning survey of photographic archives, media sources, intelligence records, and participant memoirs, the present study identifies around 100 cases of Indigenous-led iconoclasm of colonial monuments. Their subsequent analysis according to actor, motive, target, treatment, and the date of occurrence – a schema derived from David Freedberg’s 1977 ‘structure of iconoclasm’ – not only confirms the anticolonial character of the actions but also reveals synchronicity between different actors and sites. This was the consequence not of coordinated transnational strategy but of the mutual influence between anticolonial movements and of the communications technologies that enabled its global transmission, not unlike the effects of social media on movements of the 2010s onward. The result illustrates a burst of monument iconoclasm in the US and Australia in the early 1970s and a second much larger wave in the early to mid-1990s encompassing Aotearoa and Latin America also. This thesis demonstrates that the interplay of state and media repression of Indigenous interests, exposure to colonial monuments, and an appreciation for the oppressive and liberatory power of images underlies local iconoclastic responses. Coupled with the influence of international travel and communications technologies, local Indigenous-led iconoclasm circumnavigated the globe decades earlier than the social media-fuelled era of #StatuesMustFall.
- Subject
- iconoclasm; anticolonial resistance; global history; critical heritage studies; Indigenous studies
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1511255
- Identifier
- uon:56476
- Rights
- Copyright 2024 Nikolas Orr
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 20 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 282 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |