Mission Impossible

Since ancient times, statues have served as barometers of power: They go up when the fortunes of a regime run high, and when empires tumble they too can fall. What do you do with a defunct icon? The Greeks and the Romans used to recarve images, turning one emperor into another, or change

pedestal captions to suit new circumstances. French revolutionaries toppled a statue of Louis XV in today's Place de la Concorde, melted it down and replaced it with a guillotine. More recently, in Budapest, the bronze and stone corpses of the Communist regime were set up in a sculpture park just outside town, aestheticized and touristified. One wonders what happened to that statue of Saddam Hussein, pulled down with such symbolic pomp--and careful staging--in Baghdad's Firdaus Square in 2003.

The fall of the British Empire, which could once treat about a quarter of the world as its sculpture garden, has produced statue anxieties of its own, particularly in the imperial capital. Postcolonial migration has transformed London into one of the world's most diverse cities, yet images of the old empire's heroes still stand throughout the city center. At best, they are irrelevant. London Mayor Ken Livingstone has called for the Trafalgar Square images of Gen. Sir Charles Napier (conqueror of Sindh in 1843) and Gen. Sir Henry Havelock (who led the relief of Lucknow in the 1857 Indian Mutiny) to be replaced by figures "that ordinary Londoners would know." At worst, they are reminders of the black deeds of Britain's imperial past. Livingstone has unsuccessfully lobbied to position a bronze of Nelson Mandela in the square as a monument to the "peaceful transition" from British imperial dominance "to a multiracial and multicultural world."

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.