Cast in stone: statues and memories of empire in post-imperial France and Britain

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This is a multi-disciplinary project which proposes to conduct the first systematic and comparative study of statues related to colonialism in present-day France and Britain, and the many debates and possibilities that arise out of them. With a research team consisting of historians of colonial and post-colonial Britain and France, historical geographers, and legal scholars and art historians, we intend to create an online digital repository that will comprise of textual, visual and audible records that will together lend themselves to the production of locally situated but internationally connected biography of colonial statues . We shall do so by mapping all disputed statues in Britain and France, then identifying 20 statues in France and Britain (including overseas territories) for detailed study. For these statues, we shall excavate the history of their construction, piece together their perception among living and changing communities, mark their eruption into public consciousness and collate the range of voices and gestures that gather around them. We shall map out the laws, regulations and authoritative institutions that manage and police actions and narratives around these sites. In four selected case studies, we shall go further, undertaking intensive archival research and systematically recording the views of a range of groups invested in such sites - from local councils, to officials charged with the preservation of heritage, to community activists and various governance personnel (eg. the police). The material so gathered will be subjected to analysis by team members and also by specialists in critical heritage studies, art and legal studies, and art historians. The resulting data and analysis will be systematically presented in a bi-lingual, interactive website which will allow visualisation of patterns across time and across multiple locations. Thus taking a locally sensitive but globally comparative approach, using a multi-disiplinary toolkit, and applying digital technologies we aim to move create a public repository of records relating to important cultural and political developments on the one hand, and a tool for finding creative solutions for the future.The process of this research will entail active and planned collaboration with a range of stakeholders related to each of the sites and their preservation. This includes local councils, museums, government offices involved with the management and preservation of historical sites and artefacts, and community activists. These interactions will produce data, refine analytical categories and take the research findings to a wider audience, who will be invited to be collaborators rather than subjects of research in this project.