A groundbreaking exploration of how opaque monuments demand respectful commemoration of enslaved lives

In an era of debate over how monuments should function and whose stories they should tell, Monumental Opacity asks us to consider how some commemorations withhold information to resist appropriation. Sarah Juliet Lauro posits that monuments, broadly defined, that shape public memories of slavery and its resistance could employ intentional obfuscation as an insurgent strategy to protect the self-emancipation of the enslaved person and combat visual possession by curious visitors.

Construing opacity as a form of opposition that renders its subject unapprehendable to viewers, Lauro explores how this concept plays out in museums devoted to the history of slavery, as well as in literature, film, art, countermovements, and protests, with particular attention to artistic works by Kara Walker and Kerry James Marshall and literary works by Victor Hugo and Herman Melville. Opaque commemorations of rebels and freedom fighters create an unbridgeable distance between the spectator and the history they represent. In that space, we are called to consider all that we don't know about the figures we celebrate and their choice to resist their own objectification, thereby fostering a deeper sense of recognition.

Monumental Opacity is a timely and necessary call to reconsider the very act of commemoration and what it accomplishes. Offering a powerful aesthetic of subversion, Lauro inspires us to think about how—and why—history can be made unconsumable, protected from a voracious public.

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