Abstract
Monumental landscapes draw attention to the cultural politics of memory as well as the grammars of white supremacy and colonialism in their creation. In this paper, we extend this conversation, examining the entwined historical legacies of Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore. We highlight how critiques of the memorialization of white conquest can inform thinking around the relationships between Anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and the cultural landscape. Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore inscribe a shared grammar of whiteness within the cultural landscape of the United States, linking racial visions of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness. These monuments, built through massive public invesments, enable citizens to symbolically enact white entitlement to the land and renew political claims legitimating continental domination. These monuments attempt to inscribe white conquest as complete, a permanent presence in the cultural and material structure of society. However, the active Black and Indigenous contestation of these landscapes demonstrates that settler colonialism and anti-Blackness continue to be challenged. Thus, as these monuments show, they are also sites of resistance, where activists rupture the seemingly totalizing, oppressive logic of whiteness and white supremacy and demonstrate points of productive convergence in the struggles against anti-Blackness and settler colonialism.
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Allen, D.L., Connauton, J. & McCreary, T. Landscapes of white supremacy and settler colonialism: Stone Mountain, Mount Rushmore, and the contested geographies of memory in America. GeoJournal 89, 71 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-024-11059-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-024-11059-w