In\u00a0Sounding<\/a>s<\/em>, Nira Yuval-Davis discusses how the bases of social trust have been eroded during the neoliberal era, which has also been a time of increased migration. This coincidence has brought to an end \u2018the technology of multiculturalism, which, since the Second World War, has been the major technology for the control of diverse populations\u2019. An authoritarian fixation with border control has taken its place \u2013 a top-down response that has been reinforced by a bottom-up politics of belonging and exclusion:<\/p>\n The people who follow this politics continually argue that they are \u2018not racist\u2019 \u2013 although they are very much against all those who \u201cdo not belong\u201d. The extremist English Defence League, for example, has formal Jewish and Gay sections, as well as Hindu, Sikh and Afro-Caribbean supporters, which would be unimaginable in the older kinds of extreme right organisations with their neo-Nazi ideologies.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Referring to Achille Mbembe\u2019s theory of necropolitics, Yuval Davis considers the new forms of racialisation in the context of a capitalism that is completely indifferent to the fate of those who stand in the way of accumulation. The \u2018others\u2019 are not seen as an enemy: they are simply disregarded, as people with no names, identities, visibility or rights, including the right to life: \u2018racialisation \u2013 in its many forms \u2013 has been the underlying distributive principle not only of resources but also of the right to life and grievable deaths\u2019.<\/p>\n As Yuval-Davis concludes, \u2018to fight against these kinds of necro racism we need to enact a politics of care\u2019.<\/p>\n Instead of focusing on why campaigners want to remove the statues of slavers, invaders and colonisers that still litter so many of our public places, as so many conservatives have done, we should be asking who campaigned to put them up in the first place, and why, writes Milly Williamson.<\/p>\n The \u2018statue mania\u2019 of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries \u2013 the high point of European imperial expansion \u2013 served to legitimate emerging forms of nation and empire, as modern states sought to consolidate the power of their new elites by appropriating and transforming older modes of belonging. Most of the statues were erected long after the deaths of the people they commemorate. Eric Hobsbawm described this process as the \u2018invention of tradition\u2019.<\/p>\n The statue of the 17th<\/sup>-century merchant Edward Colston is a case in point. It was erected by the Bristol Corporation in 1895, nearly two hundred years after his death, following a campaign by members of the local elite involved with the Society of Merchant Venturers. Both Colston and the SMV had derived the bulk of their wealth from the slave trade, and the aim now was \u2018to move away from, and hide, their previous pro-slavery stance\u2019.<\/p>\n As part of this process they actively reconstructed Colston as a \u2018moral saint\u2019 and benevolent philanthropist, and in their campaign for Colston and against other candidates \u2013 including a number of Bristolian abolitionists \u2013 they concealed Colston\u2019s enrichment through slavery and their own previous anti-abolitionist stance. Philanthropy, then as now, was mobilised as a means to whitewash history rather than illuminate it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In summer 2020, the statue was toppled and thrown into Bristol Harbour. As Williamson recounts:<\/p>\n Rather than engaging with the concerns of campaigners and affected communities, central government\u2019s response was to double-down on an unreconstructed version of history which refuses to face up to the violence of empire, or acknowledge the pain inflicted on the ancestors of British citizens today, and to use legislation to close down avenues of legitimate campaigning.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This would seem to indicate that the power represented by statues of empire is not merely an historical relic to be tolerated as an anachronism: it is part of an ongoing structure of power that remains invested in inequality.<\/p>\n\n
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<\/p>\nStatues of empire<\/h2>\n
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The privilege of anxiety<\/h2>\n