There's a culture war we're told. Or maybe it's a war on culture - a war with a deeper and
more troubling history than you might think. Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts
over art colonialism and memory Dan Hicks joins the dots between the building of statues the
founding of disciplines like archaeology and anthropology and the acquisition of stolen art
and ancestral human remains. Part history part biography part excavation Every Monument
Will Fall pulls at a thread that runs through this history - from country houses in the
Yorkshire Wolds to Caribbean plantations and from the battlefields of Crimea and the American
Civil War to British colonial outposts in southern Ireland. The book holds the memorialisations
of men like Cecil Rhodes and General Augustus Pitt-Rivers up against the writing of Sylvia
Wynter Stuart Hall and Ursula Le Guin drawing together open secrets about dehumanisation and
the redaction of public memory. What emerges is a speculative history of inheritance loss
collective mourning and the possibility of a reconciliation that has not yet begun. This is a
story about who gets named and who doesn't who is remembered and who is forgotten who has
been treated as human and who has not. Refusing to choose between pulling down every single
statue or holding onto every last vestige of a past that future generations could never change
Every Monument Will Fall makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a
while. The result is an urgent appeal to reassemble the fragments listen to the silences
value life and humanity above material things - and to rebuild a new kind of memory culture.
