"Militarist Realism": Colonialism, Monuments, Museums, and Knowledge

The research seminar begins by asking how it might be possible to begin to join the dots between three anti-colonial movements in institutions of art, culture and education: (i) the restitution of objects in museums, (ii) the decolonisation of knowledge in libraries and seminar rooms, and (iii) fallism, through which monuments and memorials have been removed, replaced and reimagined. These three movements have mapped onto an entity that has more coherence than has previously been imagined - an art and cultural movement that ran from, say, the 1870s to the 1930s, which we might call "Militarist Realism". Indeed it is here, in a kind of corporate-colonial, proto-fascist impulse to weaponize art and culture in the name of cultural supremacy, the movement of militarist realism, that we can find the origins of the so-called "culture war" a century later. In conclusion the implications for how we think about colonialism - not through the frame of 'post-colonialism', but instead through the structures built to make its culture endure - are considered, and the prospects for remaking the "Four As" (Archaeology, Anthropology, Architecture, and Art History) without continually remaking their legacy colonial foundations.

The event will be followed by a presentation by Dan Hicks and a conversation with students from the Università La Sapienza on May 16, from 10am to 12pm.
For further details see HERE THE PDF FLYER.

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He has written widely on art, culture, architecture, heritage, museums, colonialism, and the visual and material culture of the recent past and the near-present. Dan's last book The Brutish Museums was named one of the New York Times Art Books of 2020 and the National Council on Public History's Best Book on Public History for 2022. The follow-up, Every Monument Will Fall is published in May 2025 by Penguin (Heinemann Hutchinson).

Please follow the event online through our VIMEO CHANNEL: the link will be soon published here.

Scientific Organization: Giulia Beatrice (Research Unit: Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture); Marco Ruffini and Claudio Zambianchi (Università La Sapienza, Roma)