Statues and Democracy: The Political Dynamics of Urban Assemblage

Military heroes, religious icons, revered leaders, soldiers, miners and mythical creatures – statues of various kinds stand in town squares and city streets around the world. Although they often go unnoticed, forming part of the background scenery to urban life, statues nevertheless are significant for contemporary societies. A statue is a highly political artefact that proudly performs a representative claim (Machin, forthcoming) and reflects and reproduces dominant socio-political narratives and imaginaries of the past and the future (Rai 2014). While much of the time it mundanely stands on its pedestal, at other times a statue stands out to provoke celebration and protest and to become the focus of political controversy; the rigidity of statuary belies its shifting salience and changing meanings. Statues thus provoke numerous questions for political and sociological theory: Which theoretical and methodological tools are most appropriate for assessing representative claim of a statue? How should we interpret solemn ceremonies of unveiling and the more spontaneous moments of iconoclasm? What do the politics of statues reveal about contemporary democratic representation and participation? This paper suggests that a response to these questions is aided by an analysis of the urban assemblage of which the statue is a part. An urban assemblage is understood here as a vibrant and heterogeneous composition of material objects, living bodies, political performances and multiple forces (Bennett 2010). The erection of statues involves “the coupling of particular bodies with specific spaces” (Puwar 2004: 4) and their social significance can be reified or contested through ongoing and intervening socio-material processes (Durose et al. 2022). To understand a solid bronze or marble statue as part of an assemblage is to acknowledge that its meaning is not fixed within its own features but is rather mediated through an unpredictable messy cluster of interconnecting of emotions, activities, places, gestures, relationships and things. This urban assemblage circulates within a democratic public sphere, and might itself also, but not always, foster democratic engagement that can challenge hegemonic imaginaries and empower alternatives (Butler 2015). As Hans Asenbaum points out, an assemblage is both a state and a becoming (Asenbaum 2021). Illustrating its arguments with the example of the statue of The Young Woman of Amajac that is due to replace the statue of Christopher Columbus in Mexico City, this paper examines statues as part of urban assemblages that allow democracy to dynamically transform itself.