ABSTRACT

This essay compares South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the US’s This is the Place monument, both built to commemorate cross-country settler movements, for how the two contemporaneous monuments memorialize the nineteenth-century historical event in the service of the racial politics of the twentieth century. While the Voortrekker monument’s relief sculptures represent Black Africans as savages and intractable impediments to civilization, the This is the Place monument denies race as a factor in settlement, thus attempting to absolve settlers of the racially motivated violence that attended their colonization of the Great Basin. Perched on hilltops towering over their respective settler communities, both monuments similarly draw from the language of Beaux Arts classicism to venerate their subjects as civilizing heroes amid the chaos of Western colonialism and through comparison, we can see how both assert the colonizers’ race and religion as offering a divine sanction to their acts of conquest.

摘要

这篇文章比较了南非的 Voortrekker 纪念碑和美国的 This is the Place 纪念碑，两者都是为了纪念跨国定居者运动而建造的，以了解这两个同时代的纪念碑如何为 20 世纪的种族政治服务来纪念 19 世纪的历史事件. 虽然 Voortrekker 纪念碑的浮雕将非洲黑人描绘成野蛮人和难以对付的文明障碍，但这个地方纪念碑否认种族是定居的一个因素，从而试图赦免定居者在大盆地殖民过程中出于种族动机的暴力行为。栖息在高耸于各自定居者社区的山顶上，