Tag: Zimbabwe

Categories
Blog

Colonial Statues on Twentieth-Century Film

Still from Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! (2003).
Credit: X-Filme Creative Pool. Distributed by X Verleih AG (through Warner Bros.)

Introduction

Of all the films I’ve watched throughout my life, Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! (2003), a tragicomic story of an East German family living through German reunification in the 1990s, has stayed in my memory the most. I’m not sure exactly why: it might be Yann Tiersen’s touching soundtrack that moves between the melancholic and the joyful, the sense of this ordinary family navigating the winds of historical change, or the conflicting feelings that come from the transition from socialism to capitalism as history dramatically shifts gears. One particularly evocative scene in the film depicts a broken statue of Lenin being flown by helicopter past the family’s mother Christiane, who stands looking on, absolutely stunned at what she is witnessing.

Continue reading “Colonial Statues on Twentieth-Century Film”
Categories
Blog

Repatriating Colonial Statues in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Photograph of Queen Victoria’s statue in Jamaica in 1907.
Image credit: Wikimedia / York Museums Trust.

Restitution and repatriation of objects looted (from the Hindi lūṭ, or ‘to rob’) by European imperial powers has been a key aim of decolonisation campaigns across the planet, with the focus on pressuring European countries like Britain and France to return stolen colonial items to their home countries. Tracing the afterlives of colonial statues, however, reveals a different and little-known history of repatriation: that of colonial statues themselves. This blog post is about the history of Britain’s attempts to recover and repatriate statues from its former colonies as imperial rule began to crumble.

Continue reading “Repatriating Colonial Statues in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries”