Goodbye Colston, goodbye Columbus: Why we need to learn history in times of memorial controversies?

Abstract

Around the western world various activist groups confront controversial monuments and other mnemonic infrastructures of historical culture representing contested histories and equally contested visions of the future. This article presents an original model for analyzing controversial issues of commemoration in the context of history education. Relying on the theory of historical consciousness, it first presents monuments as a distinctive type of mnemonic infrastructures of historical culture. It then delineates a conceptual model for making sense of various “types” or ways of engaging with these infrastructures: preservational, analytical, hypercritical, and reflexive. These ways of engaging are then analyzed in reference to four competencies of historical consciousness in relation to Jörn Rüsen’s recognized typology (inquiry, historical thinking, orientation, and narrative). The article explains how this new model can be transposed to the context of education so as to help students analyze past and current memorial controversies and ultimately develop more complex ways of engaging with mnemonic infrastructure in society.