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Colonial monuments as slurring speech acts
Article in Journal of Philosophy of Education · August 2021

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9752.12582
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Arianne Shahvisi
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Colonial monuments as slurring speech acts
Abstract
In recent years, the removal of monuments which glorify historical figures associated with racism
and colonialism has become one of the most visible and contested forms of decolonisation. Yet
many have objected that there is educational value in leaving such monuments standing. In this
paper, I argue that public monuments can be understood as speech acts which communicate
messages to those who live among them. Some of those speech acts derogate particular social
groups, contributing to their marginalisation in much the way that slurs do. Comparing derogating
monuments to slurs is also productive in suggesting morally appropriate responses to their harms.
I explore the limits of the use-mention distinction in relation to the harmfulness of slurs and apply
this to show that attempting to recontextualise harmful monuments in situ—by, for example,
changing the text on an accompanying plaque in order to retain the monument for its educational
value—will not solve the problem in most cases. I conclude that the removal of slurring
monuments, or their relocation to museum exhibitions dedicated to presenting a more critical
view of history, is a more robust and reliable way of protecting against harm, and that this
consideration outweighs any purported educational value in leaving monuments in place.
Word count 10750
Keywords monuments, statues, colonialism, history, racism, speech acts.
1. Introduction
Winston Churchill is supposed to have said “history is written by the victors.” The quotation may
be misattributed, but its spirit is apt in his case. Despite his well-documented racism, he is fondly
remembered for leading Britain through the Second World War, at whose close on 8th May 1945
the Allies declared victory. Indeed, the term “victory” and its attendant hand gesture are perhaps
more closely associated with Churchill than any other person. He is still widely celebrated in
British public discourse, including within the British education system, where he is presented as
an unambiguous example of heroism, a person worthy of particular esteem and approbation. Yet
the historical record is replete with examples of racism and white supremacy in Churchill’s speech
and action. It was Churchill’s ruthless policies that blocked food into Bengal in 1943, leading to
a famine that claimed the lives of three million people. His response was to blame Bengalis for
“breeding like rabbits” (Limaye, 2020). When discussing the option of using chemical weapons
against Kurds in 1919, Churchill remarked “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against
uncivilised tribes.” Neither of these incidents is surprising, because Churchill believed in a
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hierarchy of human groups. In 1937 he said that “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong
has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that
a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more
worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place” (Heyden, 2015).
Elsewhere, he wrote that when he was a junior officer in India “the Indians did not seem to be
equal to the white man” (quoted in Addison, 1980). In 1937 said of Jews that “it may be that,
unwittingly, they are inviting persecution — that they have been partly responsible for the
antagonism from which they suffer” (Cowell, 2007). In relation to the concentration camps of
Nazi Germany, Churchill remarked that:
Although no subsequent political action can condone wrong deeds, history is replete
with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim and even
frightful methods, but who nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have
been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So
may it be with Hitler (quoted in Hitchens, 1999).
He also openly supported Franco’s fascist regime during the Spanish Civil War, and supported
Mussolini’s suppression of left-wing political groups and figures (a central characteristic of fascist
regimes), noting that:
If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you
from the start to the finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites
and passions of Leninism.
In short, Churchill was a racist and a white supremacist, and the fact that he ultimately opposed
Nazism, while deserving of recognition and commendation, is perhaps best understood as
reflecting his pursuit of British supremacy and military might. Yet Churchill’s statue stands in
Parliament Square in London, on the precise spot he once indicated as his preferred location for
it. This statue, along with the way that history is taught in schools and presented on television
programmes, contributes to the erasure of his harmful views and actions. He is widely regarded
as a hero by the general public and by prominent public figures. When a 2002 television
programme entitled “100 Greatest Britons” asked members of the public to vote for their most
venerable compatriot, Churchill came in at number one (BBC News, 2002). 1 Five years before he
became Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s gushing 400-page homage, The Churchill Factor: How
One Man Made History, was published. He also has his academic apologists. The historian Paul
Addison rejected charges that Churchill was a “racialist” (a now antiquated word for “racist”),
remarking by way of explanation and exoneration that:
it would have been very surprising if Churchill had not believed in the racial
superiority of the British. […] He was a romantic who believed in the status and
1
The list of one hundred Britons failed to include a single Black person, listed just thirteen women, and
had Freddie Mercury as its sole person of colour
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prestige of the British race as ends in themselves. […] Churchill, in short, believed
in the civilizing mission of the British race (Addison, 1980, pp. 39–40).
Yet this establishment reverence does not go unchallenged. Churchill’s statue has many times
been defaced. In 2000, red paint was sprayed on its mouth, giving the appearance of dripping
blood. The perpetrator explained his actions thus:
Churchill was an exponent of capitalism and of imperialism and anti-semitism. A
Tory reactionary vehemently opposed to the emancipation of women and to
independence in India. The media machine made this paunchy little man much larger
than life - a colossal, towering figure of great stature and bearing with trademark
cigar, bowler hat and V-sign. The reality was an often irrational, sometimes
vainglorious leader whose impetuosity, egotism and bigotry on occasion cost many
lives unnecessarily and caused much suffering that was needless and unjustified
(quoted in Gillian, 2000).
During the 2020 Extinction Rebellion protests, the statue was vandalised again. Next to the
“Churchill” carving on its plinth, the spray-painted words “is a racist” were appended. During the
Black Lives Matter protests the same year, the words “was a racist” were scrawled, and a “Black
Lives Matter” placard was taped around the statue’s midriff. It was subsequently boarded up to
protect it against further damage as the protest movement gained momentum. The degree of
antipathy towards Churchill’s statue is now seen as such a serious threat that at a recent protest
against police violence and violence against women, police officers circled the base of the
Churchill statue to protect it against damage (Mohdin and Gayle, 2021).
I mention all this by way of introduction and to make several points around which this article is
structured. The first is that in Britain we are not very good at telling, knowing, or interrogating
our history; we are especially liable to allow the victor’s tale to crowd out all others. While one
might object that all nations, particularly former empires, fall prey to this selective amnesia that
Paul Gilroy refers to as “postcolonial melancholia” (Gilroy, 2005), the data paints a particularly
worrying picture in the UK. A 2020 YouGov poll found that 32% of Britons are proud of the
British Empire, 33% believe that countries colonised by Britain were left better off, and 27%
would prefer for Britain to still rule over other nations (Booth, 2020). These numbers are higher
than for other former colonial powers. This may be explained by the fact that learning history is
not compulsory beyond the age of fourteen, which makes the UK an outlier within Europe, and
the British history curriculum is particularly pronounced in its failure to make space for a critical
view of the British Empire (see e.g. Tomlinson, 2019). This trend does not look set to change
under the current government. In October 2020, Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch announced
during a Black History Month debate that “we do not want to see teachers teaching their white
pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt” and suggested that doing so could be
unlawful (Murray, 2020).
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Second, successful distortions of history require enduring propaganda, and monuments play a key
role in providing a particular lens on the past. They are the physical embodiment of the demand
that certain people or events be remembered in certain ways. They tell us not only about what
once mattered, and to whom, but in their ongoing veneration and protection even in the face of
requests for their removal, they reveal what matters now, and to whom. Their importance has
heightened in recent years as awareness of the realities of colonialism has become more
widespread and the commitment to decolonising sites of power intensifies. Thanks in no small
part to the recent work of writers of colour (e.g. Shukla, 2016; Eddo-Lodge, 2017; Akala, 2018)
and broadcasters such as David Olusoga, historic and contemporary racism are now under
increased scrutiny, paving the way for a more mainstream critique of monuments that glorify
racist figures. In June 2020, during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Bristol, a group of
protestors toppled a bronze statue of seventeenth century slave-trader Edward Colston, rolled it
towards the edge of Bristol Harbour, and pushed it into the water, amid jubilant cheers. Colston
was a manager at the Royal African Company, which shipped 84,500 enslaved people (whose
skin was branded with the company initials, “RAC”) across the Atlantic under such egregious
conditions that 19,300 people perished and were thrown overboard (Nasar, 2020). His damaged
statue has since been retrieved and in June 2021 was relocated to a temporary exhibition at the M
Shed museum in Bristol Harbour, where it lies supine, graffitied, and damaged, and is therefore
now perhaps best seen as a monument to anti-colonialism.
Not every protest has been so successful. Activists in Oxford had long campaigned for the
removal of a statue of colonialist and white supremacist Cecil Rhodes from the buildings of Oriel
College, as part of the global “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign which began in South Africa in 2015.
Following an upsurge in protest in the summer of 2020 (again as part of the Black Lives Matter
movement) Oriel College committed to removing Rhodes’ statue. In May 2021, the college
demurred, citing “regulatory and financial challenges.” As I write, Oriel’s teaching staff are
threatening to strike unless the statue is brought down (Badshah, 2021). The “regulatory”
challenge is a reference to recent government threats to take action against those found to be
responsible for the removal of monuments. Speaking in parliament in January 2021, Robert
Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, stated his intention
to require planning permission of those seeking to remove monuments: “I will not hesitate to use
those powers in relation to applications and appeals involving historic statues, plaques, memorials
or monuments where I consider such action is necessary to reflect the Government’s planning
policies as set out above” (Hansard, 2021). In September 2020, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden
wrote to prominent heritage bodies to inform them that “the government does not support the
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removal of statues or other similar objects” and remind them of their reliance on government
funding (UK Government, 2020). A state-led backlash against the movement to topple colonial
monuments is underway.
In this article, I discuss a recent wave of actions undertaken to remove, or request the removal of,
monuments which commemorate historical figures associated with racism or colonialism. I argue
that monuments should be seen as speech acts which communicate particular messages to those
who live among them, and that some monuments derogate particular social groups. While the
attendant speech act can be mitigated by modifications to the context in which it is made (by, for
example, changing the text on an accompanying plaque), this has a similar effect to that of
changing the utterance of a derogatory speech act from a use to a mention. Yet mentioning a
derogatory utterance rather than using it has limited power to remove its harm. I show that the
mitigating effect of mentioning rather than using may be even weaker in the case of modifying
the captions of monuments. I therefore argue that removal or relocation to carefully-curated
exhibitions offers a surer way of protecting against harm.
This article is structured as follows. In section two, I briefly rehearse and set aside the most
common argument in favour of leaving monuments standing: their ostensible educational value.
In section three, I describe monuments as speech acts. In section four, I argue that certain
monuments and their attendant speech acts may be productively compared to slurs in their
tendency to entrench harmful ideologies. In section five, I consider how we should respond to
slurring monuments, given their purported educational value, and argue that in situ
contextualisation is unlikely to be sufficient to protect against harm. I conclude that harmful
monuments should be toppled or relocated, and that doing so has greater educational value than
leaving them standing.
2. The argument from educational value
The most common and compelling argument against the removal of monuments references their
educational value. Monuments encode information—in their aesthetic forms, their locations, and
their inscriptions—from which we may learn. While standing, they serve as talking points and as
enduring remnants of a past with which we necessarily have limited epistemic contact. The
argument therefore goes that vital educational lessons are lost when they are removed. (Adherents
of this view often present themselves as remaining neutral on the content of the monument in
question, but of course defending the existence of monuments is itself necessarily a political
position, as I will be arguing in this paper.) If left standing, those who look upon monuments may
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derive educational value from them, and provided the monument is properly contextualised, any
potential harms can be limited.
In this article, I show that this view is misguided, and that the removal or relocation of particular
statues has greater educational value than leaving them in place. My argument rests on the
observation that the face value interpretation of some monuments derogates particular groups,
and that the kind of in situ contextualisation that is required in order to ensure that such
monuments’ educational value outweighs their harms is not easy to achieve, and is much more
straightforwardly met by removing or relocating the monument. I turn to this argument in
subsequent sections of the paper. First, it pays to mention an even simpler set of objections to the
argument from educational value.
Helen Frowe argues that if statues are merely, or mostly, historical records, with vital educational
value but without any questionable evaluative content (i.e. esteem for those who were racist), as
is sometimes argued, then why don’t we erect and maintain statues of people whose historical
contribution is significant but does not merit respect or celebration? (Frowe, 2019) Where are the
statues of influential figures like Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, or “Jack the Ripper”? Historical import
alone is clearly not sufficient for a person to be cast in bronze. Approbation is also necessary (and
wealth, in many cases). That means that if statues are historical records, they represent a minor
and problematically curated telling of history, and if they have educational value, it is chiefly in
their ability to tell us something about the dominant values of the past. But dominant values are,
by their very nature, hard to bury, avoid, or forget, so these statues do not serve educational needs
that cannot be met in other, more informative and less harmful, ways. It seems strange and
unhelpful for such a gerrymandered sliver of history to take up so much prominent public space.
Further, since public monuments are only ever constructed by those with the financial and social
capital to do so, and are normally challenged or removed as a result of protest actions by, or on
behalf of, those from marginalised groups, the second action is the more educationally valuable
one, because it challenges the establishment’s control of the narrative in ways that are more likely
to get at the truth or allow us to triangulate towards it. As Gary Younge puts it: “To put up a statue
you must own the land on which it stands and have the authority and means to do so. As such
they represent the value system of the establishment at any given time that is then projected into
the forever.” (Younge, 2021). Monuments reflect establishment ideologies of the past, which are
then enforced upon all those who subsequently use that public space. Again, such ideologies are
the dominant ones; their traces and artefacts are not in short supply. A lost statue does not mean
a lost story. By contrast, counter-dominant ideologies tend to have fainter historical footprints.
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Therefore, if learning is best served through exposure to a range of perspectives (which seems a
truism) then high-profile challenges to monuments, including their removal, are apt to be more
valuable than leaving all monuments standing.
Recent events support this theory. More people learned about Colston and Bristol’s role in the
slave trade following the toppling of his statue last summer than had ever learned by the object
standing unquestioned in the centre of the city for a century and a half (Nasar, 2020). The same
can be said of Rhodes. To take another example, note that British education on Nazi Germany
has not been hampered by the fact that there all Nazi monuments in Germany were destroyed or
relocated to museums in accordance with a “denazification” directive. Note also that the directive
was issued by the Allied Control Council, which consisted of the US, the Soviet Union, France,
and the UK. In other words, Britain has experience both of demanding the removal of monuments
to racist regimes and figures, and of nonetheless managing to keep the horrors of Nazism alive in
public discourse. The most likely explanation for this achievement is that it is in fact very easy to
learn about history without any accompanying statues, easier still when preserving knowledge of
the horrors committed by another nation not only poses no threat to the reputation of Britain, but
accentuates its positive reputation by emphasising its opposition.
It is also worth noting that insisting upon the educational value of historical monuments seems
hypocritical, given that Britain has considerable precedent in the destruction of historical artefacts
for ignoble reasons. “Operation Legacy” refers to the British government policy of systematically
destroying thousands of documents and which outlined some of the most egregious crimes of
colonial regimes, including accounts of colonial subjects being tortured and burned alive. The
idea was to protect Britain’s reputation from “embarrassment” and to avoid postcolonial
governments discovering the extent of their wrongdoing (Sato, 2017). No doubt the destroyed
documents would have had tremendous educational value had they been retained and used to
reflect upon the realities of the British Empire.
It hardly needs to be said that little, if any, of a person’s education in Britain derives from exposure
to monuments. 2 This is not a failure of monuments, but a misunderstanding of them. Their
intention was never to educate us, rather they are erected to reflect and create particular ideologies
by honouring people who represent certain ideas or interpretations. As Olusoga puts it “we need
to accept that statues are not delivery systems for the public understanding of history and that
2
As one writer recently quipped on Twitter: “The hardest thing about doing a history degree was all the
statues I had to keep in my flat” (Rick Burin, 2021). The joke works (and got thousands of likes) because
we all take it as given that statues play almost no role in the learning of history.
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some were principally created to silence marginalised voices rather than commemorate events
past” (Olusoga, 2017). By contrast, the education of Britons is critically dependent on the funding
of schools and libraries, both of which have suffered serious funding cuts in recent years (Flood,
2020; Sibieta, 2020) by the same government that is now vociferously defending statues for their
historical value, and even producing additional legislation to protect them (UK Home Office,
2021).
3. Monuments as speech acts
A monument is an object that is constructed 3 in order to memorialise an event or a person. Here,

I am concerned here only with monuments located in public or state-funded spaces (e.g. parks,
squares, educational institutions, and state buildings) that were constructed with the intention of
having some degree of prominence and permanence. Public monuments take on many physical
forms, but are always erected with the intention that they communicate particular messages to
those who look upon them. Indeed, the word ‘monument’ derives from the ancient Greek term
‘moneo’: to refer, to learn, or to warn. Monuments are designed to tell us something. In the case
of statues, this message is often the glorification or remembrance of a particular person or event.
The precise content of that message is sometimes evinced in the physical details of the monument.
A supercilious man with his chest puffed out is someone we’re called upon to respect. An object
inscribed with names is a demand that we remember people who died as a result of a particular
event. Yet the message is also dependent on the context in which it is interpreted. There is a
sometimes a difference between the message that was intended and the message that is now
transmitted. Because statues are designed to endure over long periods of time, they exist over
timespans during which dominant values and understandings of historical events and figures vary.
As such, whether or not they make use of words, monuments may be regarded as communicating
meaning. Accordingly, geographers have undertaken textual studies of monuments, an approach
which “understands commemoration as the process of manifesting stories on and through the
landscape” (Dwyer and Alderman, 2008, p. 169). More recently, philosopher Geoffrey Scarre has
examined monuments through the lens of speech act theory, noting that to produce a memorial is
“a communicative act, akin to the utterance or writing of a sentence” (Scarre, 2019). Here, I follow
3
Not all monuments are constructed as monuments. In Beirut, a decrepit, bombed out Holiday Inn close to
the city’s ‘green line’ which was the site of some of the most intense violence during the country’s fifteen-
year civil war still stands. This is because it is jointly owned and the companies cannot agree on its future,
but the blank, windowless tower has come to serve as a very visible reminder of the conflict that tore apart
the country, and a warning against its repetition (Nayel, 2015). Monuments can therefore be accidental. In
this article I am concerned only with intentional monuments.
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Scarre in analysing those communicative acts through the work of J. L. Austin, whose theory
describes a “speech act” as any form of expression that not only provides information, but also
constitutes an action of some kind (Austin, 1975). 4 For example, if, in the context of a meal, I say
to my sister “is there any chilli sauce left?” I not only ask about the state of the jar of chilli sauce,
I also request that the sauce be passed to me. My words therefore perform the action of making
that request. (And my sister recognises my utterance as a request because of certain conventions
about polite utterances at the dinner table. 5) By contrast, if I was to sing the Bob Dylan lyric
“Come gather 'round people/ wherever you roam” while washing the dishes, that utterance would
perform no action in the world. Austin distinguished between three elements of a speech act: the
locutionary act, the illocutionary act, and the perlocutionary effect. In brief, the locution is the
bare utterance, the illocution is the action performed by that utterance, and the perlocution is the
effect of that act. In the earlier case, the locution is just the physical utterance of the words “is
there any chilli sauce left?”, the illocution is the request for chilli sauce that these words make,
and the perlocutionary effect is my sister feeling compelled to pass me the sauce, and then in fact
passing it.
Speech act theory may seem an unusual lens through which to examine monuments, because
although some may include an inscription, they are not generally understood as forms of speech.
Yet speech acts need not be linguistic utterances, as Austin himself points out (Austin, 1975, pp.
118–9). Pointing at something can be a speech act, as can a Nazi salute, a raised eyebrow, the
wielding of a weapon, or the lighting of celebratory fireworks. Each of these actions occurs in a
context in which it has a conventional meaning, and is widely understood to therefore
communicate a message in much the same way that an utterance does. Speech acts can also be
performed by objects. For example, in England, having a St George’s flag in one’s garden outside
of major football tournaments often performs the illocutionary act of announcing particular views
on race and immigration. 6 This can have the perlocutionary effect of offering solidarity to like-
minded neighbours who are also displaying the flag or passers-by who feel similarly (i.e. it may
be, and succeed in being, an attempt to belong or form community). Yet in some cases, and for
some people, an intended perlocutionary effect will fail and another effect will instead take place.
4
Speech act theory has been applied elsewhere in the philosophy of education. See e.g. (Ruitenberg, 2015,
2017).
5
This utterance is also an example of conversational implicature. See e.g. (Grice, 1981).
6
Of course, there may be other reasons to fly the St George’s flag. An anonymous reviewer made the
suggestion that the illocution might instead be an expression of resistance towards those establishment
figures who interpret national flags in residential areas as socioeconomic markers, and are disgusted by
them for that reason. Regardless, in these cases the perlocutionary sequel will still be to harm people of
colour, migrants, and all those frightened or offended by racism, which would make it a very divisive and
problematic form of protest.
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This is instead known as a perlocutionary sequel. A St. George’s flag can have the effect of
intimidating neighbours or passers-by, specially migrants and people of colour. This may in some
cases be a perlocutionary effect or it may be a perlocutionary sequel.
The creation and installation of a monument should be seen as the locutionary act. Those who
commission, design, and install monuments in effect (intend to) make an utterance through the
object to those who see or hear it. In its erection and in its presence thereafter, an illocutionary
act takes place in which this message is communicated to onlookers. In many cases, illocutionary
acts rely on extra-semantic convention in order for utterances to succeed as acts, so that in
particular circumstances, an utterance performs a speech act, though it may not (necessarily) do
so in others. It is conventional for statues of historical figures to be declarations of esteem. (But
it is not conventional for cartoonist’s impressions of historical figures to be declarations of
esteem; quite the opposite.) As a general rule, monuments communicate “positive evaluative
attitudes” towards those they represent (Frowe, 2019). As Schulz puts it, they are “symbolic
vehicles for a story a community tells about its past and how its past has shaped its present
identity, values, beliefs, aims, and relations with other communities” (Schulz, 2019, pp. 167–8).
That monuments do things, that they convey particular messages and not others, and that those
messages have effects on how people conceive of themselves and each other, is evident in the fact
that, as Schulz goes on to point out, revolutions or significant regime changes have often been
accompanied by monuments being toppled, others being erected, and the names of streets,
squares, and even cities, being changed.
The statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was erected to honour him. It stands twelve
feet high and rises over one of the country’s most famous greens. The figure itself rests on a stick,
but with a posture of self-assuredness and an expression of pugnacious defiance (which at the
time concerned the committee because of its resemblance to Mussolini). These particular aesthetic
details are intended to contribute to the aim of celebrating Churchill, and communicating a
message to the effect of “here in the most important political location in the country stands the
likeness of a person who is worthy of remembrance and admiration.” In 2020, Prime Minister
Boris Johnson gave some idea of the illocutionary act performed by the statue when he described
it as “a permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country – and the whole of Europe
– from a fascist and racist tyranny” (Giordano, 2020). (As the introduction to this paper attests,
that is at best an oversimplification.) Finally, there’s the perlocutionary effect of a monument,
which is the intended effect the illocutionary act has upon those who see it or hear about it. Those
erecting monuments typically hope or expect to remind viewers of a person or event, and-or to
evoke feelings of pride, nostalgia, admiration, appreciation, inspiration, or sympathy. The statue
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of Churchill in Parliament Square often fails in its intended perlocutionary effect and instead has
the sequel of filling increasing numbers of people with shame, revulsion, outrage, anger, and
alienation.
There are two related ways to understand the problem with the illocutionary acts of glorification
constituted by monuments of racist or colonial figures. First, such monuments lie. They announce
the virtues or achievements of a person while making no reference to the harms they caused. This
is why it is particularly frustrating to hear public figures claim that removing such a statue would
be an act of dishonesty or erasure. In 2020, Boris Johnson said that toppling statues would amount
to “lying about our history” and an attempt to “edit or censor the past” (Giordano, 2020). Yet the
monument itself—and the distorted curricula and public discourse that goes with it—is itself part
of a lie, and the request for revision or removal a demand for greater honesty. (Another part of
that lie is the near-total absence of monuments to recognise the contributions of other groups,
such as women and people of colour. Only 3% of Britain’s public monuments depict women, and
there were no statues of Black women until 2016, when Mary Seacole’s statue was erected outside
St Thomas' Hospital, in Lambeth.)
The second way to understand the illocutionary acts of these monuments is as requesting that we
glorify in spite of the person’s racism, which is also problematic. Morally speaking, it is probably
better to admire Churchill while in ignorance of his racism than to admire him in spite of it. For
some of us, the statue of Churchill transmits a message that is heard as follows “this man is a hero
in spite of his hateful speech and actions” or instead “the people who died or were dehumanised
as a result of Churchill’s words and actions did not matter at the time of the statue’s erection, and
this statue still stands because they still do not matter.” The illocutionary act of his statue is not
just a declaration of Churchill’s accomplishments as a war leader, it is a request that we elevate
those achievements and forget the very serious harms he contributed to. Worse, it is a request that
we ignore the fact that he was a contributor to the very same system of racial hierarchies that
seeded the regime of Nazism that many honour him for opposing. From an educational
perspective, that is a very dangerous and obfuscating directive.
At this point it might be objected that I am guilty of moral purism in holding Churchill to an
impossible standard; everyone makes mistakes and has moral shortcomings: why should
Churchill, Rhodes, Colston, or any other person, be expected to be perfect? Many people at that
time would have openly held the prejudices they did; Churchill was, as the argument goes, very
much “a man of his time.” Can’t we recognise their achievements as part of the multitudes they
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also contained, and judge them by the moral standards of their time, rather than ours? 7 There are
many responses to this. First, the “mistakes” and “shortcomings” of these men are not on the same
scale as the mistakes of their contemporaries or of ordinary people more generally. Causing a
famine and which led to the deaths of millions is not the same thing as harbouring biases against
an unfamiliar group of people (though granted, the second is often a determinant of the first). We
are talking about people whose contribution to racism and colonialism was outsized, and whose
abuses of power are historically notable. Second, racism was always racism. It is dangerous and
unhelpful to suggest that racism and colonialism were less repugnant at a particular time, given
that their effects—alienation, violence, extraction, kidnapping, death—have presumably always
been just as painful and abhorrent. To suggest that we apply different moral standards for different
times is to ask us to empathise or side with particular (in this case, white, wealthy) people living
in those times, rather than marginalised groups, which is a morally troubling and one-sided
request. Besides, many of the contemporaries of Rhodes, Colston, and Churchill opposed racism
and colonialism; there were certainly other perspectives around (see e.g. Gopal, 2019). Most
importantly, objections which point to moral purism miss the point. We are not weighing
Churchill’s achievements against his racism. Rather, as Frowe puts it, “we are weighing the duty
to condemn [Churchill’s racism] against the good of having the statue” (Frowe, 2019: original
emphasis). If we think some of Churchill’s actions merit praise—i.e. his leadership against
Hitler’s fascist regime—then a monument that clearly marked that, and only that, would be a
better choice. Indeed, it hardly needs to be argued that a monument to mark the struggle against
fascism in Europe in the 1930s would have more obvious educational value than a statue of a
person whose symbolism will always be ambiguous and multifaceted.
Similar stories can be told in relation to other monuments. When Colston’s statue was erected in
Bristol in 1895, a local newspaper stated that the statue was “designed to encourage the citizens
of today to emulate Colston’s noble example and walk in his footsteps” (quoted in Nasar, 2020).
Its inscription read “Erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and
wise sons of their city.” Here, the locution is the bronze likeness, the illocutionary act is the
glorification of Colston as a noble, virtuous, and wise person, a person to be remembered and
respected. The statue (until its recent demise) requested that we ignore, downplay, or forgive the
grave harms to which he contributed and on which his wealth and fame were built. One might say
that the statue was an invitation to be complicit in this manicured remembering, which is a chilling
and morally inappropriate request to make of those who walked beneath it, especially Bristol’s
7
Gary Younge calls this objection the “But that was before racism was bad” argument (Younge, 2021).
Kehinde Andrews has called it “the Jimmy Savile defence” in reference to the serial sexual abuser and
television personality (Wintle, 2018).
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communities of colour. The intended perlocutionary effect is that Bristolians feel a sense of pride
in Colston and his achievements. The actual effect, in many cases, was to remind them that even
three hundred years after his death, upholding the reputation of one racist man who made his
fortune in a morally reprehensible way is more important than taking concrete actions to condemn
the system of which he was a part, and on which Britain’s power, wealth, and racism are founded.
Finally, it is important to note that toppling monuments may itself be seen as a speech act. When
the protestors in Bristol brought down Colston’s statue, rolled it along the street, and threw it into
the harbour, they performed the illocutionary act of saying something akin to “down with racism
and colonialism” and achieved the perlocutionary effect (among others) of frightening
establishment figures into realising that many of us will no longer tolerate the glorification of the
British Empire and Britain’s failure to reckon with its own history.
4. Racist monuments and slurring speech acts
The perlocutionary effect or sequel of certain monuments is to contribute to the marginalisation

of particular social groups by ignoring their oppression or relegating it to a mere footnote in the
more important objective of glorifying a person or an event. In this section I’ll show that racist
monuments function similarly to slurs in their tendency to derogate, and this comparison is
productive in suggesting morally appropriate responses.
Slurs are harmful words or expressions that are used to derogate particular social groups or
members thereof. They express contempt and tend to homogenise and thereby dehumanise
individuals from the groups to which they refer. Slurs are complex linguistic entities around which
a rich philosophical literature has emerged in recent years, particularly in relation to their tricky
semantics (see e.g. Jeshion, 2013, 2020; Camp, 2018; Liu, 2020). Here, I am interested only in
some comparatively uncontroversial features of their pragmatics. Slurs may be understood as
speech acts whose illocutions serve to humiliate, insult, frighten, demean, express hate etc. (see
e.g. (Langton, 2012)). Slurs are well-established terms, and those who share a social milieu have
a good working understanding of both their conventional targets and the range of harmful
messages they are used to convey. This means that the utterance of slurs cannot be studied in
isolation, but must be understood as part of the system in which they acquire their meaning and
perform their harms. Consider Butler’s insight that:
racist speech could not act as racist speech if it were not a citation of itself; only
because we already know its force from its prior instances do we know it to be so
offensive now, and we brace ourselves against its future invocations (Butler, 1997,
p. 80, their emphasis).
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In other words, slurs serve to “cue” and entrench damaging ideologies, where an ideology is
summarised as “a temporally persistent and socially extended cluster of mutually supporting
beliefs, interests, norms, practices, values, affective dispositions, and ways of interpreting and
interacting with the world” (Swanson, 2019). Slurs work by tapping into and strengthening this
set of background assumptions and categories. Calling someone a “slut” draws on the idea of
normative gendered sexual behaviour, which derives from a patriarchal ideology. Without this
ideological backdrop, the word “slut” doesn’t mean anything; with it, an utterance of the term
harnesses a colossal arsenal of harmful assumptions and restrictions, and in doing so, reinforces
them.
Quill Kukla (writing as Rebecca Kukla) builds on this picture of how slurs function, emphasising
that ideologies also (a) entrench particular social ontologies, and (b) they are also embodied in
our material environments, in “phenomena such as buildings, aesthetic products, street signs,
spatial divisions such as gates and hedges, and the like” (Kukla, 2018). In other words, ideologies
can also be constituted by objects such as monuments, and those monuments can contribute to the
production of certain social ontologies, which is to say certain categories and hierarchies of human
groups. Kukla draws on Althusser’s (1971) notion of “interpellation” as the means by which
ideologies produce their subjects through “hails” which call upon people to recognise themselves
as belonging to the social groups the ideology carves society into. Althusser’s paradigm example
is that of a police officer, whose hail of “Hey, you there!” uttered in the street causes me to turn
and thereby acknowledge my subjecthood to a particular society and legal system, while cornering
me into assuming the role of potential criminal. The announcement “it’s a boy/girl!” functions
similarly to socially construct gendered subjects (Butler, 1990), as does being confronted with
binary entrances to public bathrooms (Kukla, 2018, pp. 15–16).
Kukla argues that slurs interpellate members of their target groups into subject positions in which
they are fungible, demeaned, and subordinated. They act in conjunction with a range of other
factors that produce these subject positions, and serve to remind their targets that they occupy
these dehumanising and subordinating positions, while others do not. In this way, they interpellate
the non-slurred group as much as they do their targets, and thereby stabilise the ideology as a
whole.
Importantly, monuments also interpellate subjects through the ideologies they cue via their speech
acts. Statues of racist and colonial historical figures are not quite slurs, but they may be compared
to slurs in ways that are illuminating. Monuments whose illocutionary acts involve the
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glorification of racism and colonialism often have the perlocutionary effect of entrenching racism
and diminishing the suffering of racialized groups. They remind people of colour that they live in
a society in which racists can nonetheless be heroes, and colonialism is as often seen as cause for
celebration as for condemnation. While slurs may be uttered by people from many different social
positions, monuments are, by their very nature, “heard” as speech acts that are uttered by the state,
since the ground on which they stand, and the responsibility for their upkeep, belongs to state
institutions. When monuments derogate, that derogation is made credible by the authority of a
state.
Schulz argues that monuments constitute two wrongs. They are degrading and alienating, because
“they are expressive of an ideology that is both disrespectful and expressively connected to an
existing and wrongful social hierarchy” and because “commemorative infrastructure may fail to
provide sources of self-respect when it fails to provide expressive assurance to those who
constitute society of their shared equal status” (Schulz, 2019, p. 168). Yet note that the wrong of
slurs may be articulated in similar terms: they hail ideologies that are disrespectful and connected
to a wrongful hierarchy that persists in the present day, 8 and thereby degrade certain groups; they
also perpetuate linguistic infrastructure that fails to provide expressive assurance to certain groups
of their shared equal status. A similar point is made elsewhere. Geographers Dwyer and Alderman
note that the “exclusion of particular groups from the domain of commemoration “assist in
reproducing the social and cultural order, contributing to the further subordination and invisibility
of subaltern groups” (Dwyer and Alderman, 2008, p. 169). Courtney R. Baker describes
monuments as “demands made by a past body of people that we honor their values in the present”
(Baker, 2019).
Like Althusser’s police officer, derogating statues shout “Hey, you there” to particular passers-
by, and when the person turns and sees the name on the plaque, or catches the self-satisfied
expression on the statue’s bronze countenance, or pauses to read the glorifying tribute, the statue
communicates its message of derogation: you don’t matter. Imagine a speaker mounted in a public
space which played recordings of racist utterances on a loop, or a billboard emblazoned with a
message or image that glorified colonialism displayed above a major street. Monuments that
8
This connection between wrongful social hierarchies of the past and present is important when considering
which monuments derogate marginalised groups (and, indeed, what counts as a slur). Some monuments are
representative of people, regimes, or events that are related to wrongful social hierarchies that have not
persisted to the present day (consider much of the statuary of the strict social hierarchies of various ancient
civilisations), so that it would be a push to claim that anyone was derogated in the same way by their
perpetuation. Roman emperor Caligula was, by all accounts, a hateful person, but his behaviours don’t map
onto modern forms of oppression in ways that would cause any particular group to be derogated by his
statue.
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glorify racism and colonialism are rarely quite so overtly harmful as these fictional examples, but
the difference is one of degree, not kind. (Readers who struggle to accept this comparison should
imagine how it would feel if one’s route to work meant walking beneath a triumphant statue of
Adolf Hitler, and then reflect upon what it means that they would object to a statue of Hitler, but
not one of Colston.)
5. What should we do with racist monuments?
No object has terrified me more than the Ku Klux Klan cloak and hood displayed in the
International Slavery Museum in Liverpool’s Royal Albert Dock. While I’d seen the distinctive
garb in films and documentaries, those scenes had not prepared me for a confrontation with the
object itself. The bodiless outfit stands bolt upright in a standalone glass cabinet, its white capirote
with its blank eye holes towering over visitors like a shark-fin rising above a water-line. My heart
quickens and my stomach tightens every time I lay eyes upon it, and, lingering to review the
exhibit label, 9 I hear the sharp intakes of breath of other visitors, who round the corner and
experience that same physiological shock. Yet despite the distress caused by the object, it is hard
to argue that there could be a better place for it than in a thoughtfully-curated exhibition on the
history of the transatlantic slave trade and its relationship to racism today. The outfit is
accompanied by a note that describes the Ku Klux Klan as an “overtly racist group” defined by
its white supremacy as well as its anti-Semitism, homophobia, and racism towards immigrants.
Its case is situated within a broader exhibition that includes the testimonies of enslaved people
and the details of their rebellions, the wrist and ankle shackles used on ships in the Middle
Passage, and information on the underdevelopment of Africa by colonial powers, amongst other
text and artefacts. These objects are presented in the same large space, just metres from each
other. As with any museum, visitors are invited to view and interpret each exhibit in the
intentional context in which the curators have placed it. This means understanding an object in
relation to other objects, aided by their labels and the broader curatorial notes.
If an object as incendiary as a Ku Klux Klan cloak and hood can be disarmed by contextualisation,
might museums be the best places for harmful monuments? At their best, museums are slow,
thoughtful spaces. They can encourage looking, reading, thinking, and forming connections in
9
The label reads “This Ku Klux Klan outfit is from the 1920s. It was donated by a gentleman who has
relatives in Orange County, New York, and was the property of the step-father of a family friend” (National
Museums Liverpool, 2021). It’s amusing to note the lengths the donor has gone to in order to distance
himself from the object.
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ways that are orchestrated by curators hoping to bring particular messages to the fore. Yet
museums have arguably contributed more to the whitewashing of colonialism and the othering of
people of colour than have public monuments, and are therefore not the obvious location for the
correction of these particular harms (Wajid and Minott, 2019; Hicks, 2020). At their worst,
museums consist of collections of stolen goods presented as colonial trophies and are themselves
mirrors for prevailing ideologies, reflecting the worldview of their funders. All too often, they
end up facilitating the othering of particular groups by encouraging visitors to gawp at the
decontextualized strangeness of other places, peoples, and times. One might further argue that
museums are often themselves monuments of a sort, albeit with complex internal structures. The
British Museum, for example, with its extensive collections of artefacts obtained through British
colonial incursions, may be seen as a glorifying monument to British imperialism. Like
monuments, museums can act as conduits for particular ideologies, transmitting particular
messages and pedestalling or obfuscating particular interpretations of history. Consider that
moving a statue of Cecil Rhodes, Edward Colston, or Winston Churchill to a museum or
exhibition devoted to the glorification of the British Empire might be worse than leaving them in
place.
The suggestion that harmful monuments be transferred to museums is a common one (usually
proffered as a middle-ground by sympathetic public figures who find the idea of outright removal
too radical) and has some obvious benefits. It is incontrovertible that, if relocated to a museum, a
harmful object is less able to derogate, and its interpellative power is reduced. This is mainly
because its illocutionary act is performed in an enclosed space, rather than being effectively yelled
across a public square, and monuments in public spaces tend, by convention, to demand
veneration, while objects in museums merely invite consideration. As Helen Frowe points out,
objects displayed in museums are “not typically restricted to things we admire—rather, we use
museums to display all kinds of objectionable things, such as medieval torture implements and
relics from concentrations camps” (Frowe, 2019). Further, while exposure to public monuments
is non-consensual, since we must all use particular public spaces, entering museums is more
voluntary, so the harm of direct exposure would be reduced. There are several caveats to note
here. First, while exposure to museums may be more optional than exposure to open public
spaces, museums still contribute to ideologies in much the same way that public monuments do.
Further, exposure to museums is not necessarily avoidable, and nor should certain groups feel
more inclined to avoid them. School groups are often taken to museums on mandatory educational
trips, and museums are popular sites of leisure and tourism, and are some of the only free indoor
spaces in the UK. They are also concentrated sites of cultural capital, so that any features which
deter marginalised groups should be cause for concern.
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Yet monuments in museums would be less likely to be consumed casually, or in isolation. Objects
in museums demand more careful inspection and thought than public monuments, and they are
necessarily viewed in relation to the objects around them. They have the advantage of being
overseen by teams of experts, including historians who are likely to have a more critical and
nuanced view of the monuments than the public officials who oversee their construction and
maintenance. Though they are sometimes stereotyped as stuffy, static places, museums are
significantly more dynamic than public memorials. Objects are moved between storage and
display, they are arranged within changing exhibitions (often reflecting matters of public concern)
so that their neighbouring exhibits and context can vary, and their labels are easily and regularly
edited compared with the immutable engravings of monuments. Museums may have a similarly
troubled relationship to racism and colonialism, but they have a potential for continual, dynamic
improvement in ways that public monuments do not. 10 Getting harmful monuments off the streets
and into museums presents far greater possibilities for their in situ contextualisation.
Those in favour of leaving public monuments standing might argue that the benefits of
contextualisation offered by museums can be provided in situ through additional signage, and that
this has greater educational value because monuments are wholly public, while museums can feel
like elite spaces to be eschewed by those who feel they do not belong. (The option of a modified
caption to accompany Colston’s statue in Bristol was explored in the years before its toppling,
though there was a protracted disagreement about the wording of the revision.) Comparing
harmful monuments to slurs yields useful insights about the possibilities for recontextualisation.
Editing the caption that accompanies any public monument (e.g. the text on the plinth of a statue)
so that those who approach it have the option of reading a more critical history of the person or
event that is being glorified may be seen as a physical analogue to changing the use of a slur into
a mention of a slur. Philosophers distinguish between using and mentioning terms, i.e. the
difference between saying “statues are often harmful” (which is to use the word “statue”) and
saying “‘statue’ has six letters” (which is to mention the word “statue”). It is programmatic that
mentioning a slur is less harmful than using one. For example, saying “some people call women
‘sluts’” is less harmful than statements like “some women are sluts.”
10
Many museums are now embarking on a process of “decolonisation.” Marenka Thompson-Odlum,
curator at the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum described this process of one of expansion, not
restriction, of the museum’s display: “A lot of people might think about the removal of certain objects or
the idea of restitution as a loss, but what we are trying to show is that we aren’t losing anything but creating
space for more expansive stories. That is at the heart of decolonisation. We are allowing new avenues of
story-telling and ways of being to be highlighted” (Pitt Rivers Museum, 2020).
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Mentioning a slur may be less harmful, but mentioning rather than using harmful language does
not eliminate harm entirely. Hearing the n-word mentioned is better than hearing it used, but it is
much better not to have to hear it at all. As Bolinger notes, mentions of slurs can still indicate
offensive attitudes “ranging from simple insensitivity to perverse pleasure at saying discomfiting
words, and disregard for the risk of encouraging derogating uses of the slur” (Bolinger, 2017, p.
452), and as Pullum observes “[m]ere acoustic or inscriptional realization of these words, no
matter what the intent, causes the offense” (Pullum, 2018). Indeed, psychologists have shown that
the utterance of a slur activates implicit biases and leads to stereotype threat among members of
the slur’s target group even when the slur is being mentioned (see Herbert, 2018, and references
therein). My own view is that there is power in using a dedicated circumlocution in lieu of a slur
(n-word, p-word, etc.) because doing so not only avoids the harm of the slur but also normalises
a prohibition on the use of that slur and, precisely because such circumlocutions are so jarring to
hearers, encourages reflection on the extent of its harmfulness. 11
Modifying the caption of a harmful monument while leaving it standing may be compared to
mentioning, rather than using, a slur. The harmful illocutionary act of the monument is still
“uttered,” but if the viewer gets closer, they’ll see that this “utterance” is in fact mitigated by a
harm-reducing context. But there are several reasons why this in situ contextualisation is even
less likely to succeed for monuments than it does for slurring words. Modifying the captions of
harmful monuments is like placing scare quotes around a statue to indicate that some other, past
society valued the things this person did, rather than the current one. Yet those scare quotes rely
on the viewer getting near enough to read the caption. Monuments are usually registered from a
distance, while caveats added to their captions require pedestrians to approach and study the
monument. It is plausible that the harm of a monument of a racist figure occurs simply through
seeing the monument or knowing it is there. A statue of Hitler would unsettle me long before I
got close enough to read a caption outlining his misdeeds, and if that caption was in German or
Hindi (say), the attempt at contextualisation would entirely miss its target. Statues transcend
languages and cultures; captions do not. As with slurs, a much safer bet is to eliminate the
locution: don’t utter slurs; don’t maintain harmful monuments.
So how should we respond to monuments that glorify racism and colonialism? My answer is
straightforward: in the same way that we respond to slurs. We ought not to utter slurs, because
doing so cues harmful ideologies and leads to their entrenchment. We also ought to take measures
11
Sometimes, mentioning a slur is unavoidable e.g. if a witness is asked in a court of law to repeat what
an attacker said, in order to confirm that hate speech occurred.
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to prevent others from uttering slurs, to challenge slurs when we hear them, and to prevent those
who are harmed by slurs from being exposed to, and thereby harmed by, them. In relation to
monuments, this means resisting the construction of new harmful monuments, as well as
removing existing harmful monuments from public spaces and either destroying them, archiving
them, or displaying them in carefully-curated museum exhibitions, ideally those dedicated
specifically to challenging the distorted view of history that prevails in the UK, where they can
be more carefully contextualised and studied alongside other objects. The precise response will
depend on the monument in question, and the groups most harmed by monuments that glorify
racism and colonialism will likely have the sharpest instincts as to the most productive and
reparative course of action. In some cases, those most harmed by monuments may wish to deface,
topple, and destroy the object themselves, rather than have it carted off to some protective archive,
from which it might be resurrected and reinstated or repurposed at some future point. Official,
top-down toppling and relocation therefore not be the most appropriate course of action in some
cases.
Decisions to move derogating monuments to museums would in most cases be made by those in
positions of power (local councils, politicians, and museum directors, for example), usually in
response to pressure from members of the public, typically applied through online campaigns and
protests. Yet what happens when those efforts come to nothing? Certainly, the present UK
government seems intent on keeping derogating statues standing. 12 In cases in which official
removals do not take place, Ten-Herng Lai has argued that not only is it morally permissible, but
it may also be obligatory to vandalise derogating statues (Lai, 2020) as a form of “counter speech”
which, on my analysis, might be seen as a reactive, countervailing illocution.
For what it is worth, I will finish by agreeing with Gary Younge that it is perhaps time to let go
of statues across the board as a method of glorifying and remembering (Younge, 2021). Times
change; stone and bronze don’t. Like teenage tattoos, they generally seem like a good idea at the
time, but it’s hard to anticipate alternative frames of reference in advance, and they are awkward
to reverse. Immortalising our idols and values will always be fraught, risky, and perhaps futile,
even when the figure in question seems like a decent person. Consider that it is not only statues
of racist and colonial figures that can lead to complexities. In 2019, a statue of Barack Obama
was erected at Hampton University, a historically Black university in Virginia, to honour the first
Black president of the United States. Yet Obama’s use of drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and
Yemen, which have killed many civilians, are widely considered to amount to war crimes, and it
12
Though note that dozens of statues honouring colonial figures have quietly been taken down since
Colston’s toppling (Mohdin and Storer, 2021).
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may ultimately be these for which he is remembered (Bachman, 2013). For some, his statue may
enact the intended speech act of glorifying the achievements of Black people, while for others,
the statue may instead have the perlocutionary sequel of whitewashing his crimes and may
accordingly be seen as a declaration of the low value of Brown and Muslim lives. A monument
to racial justice, rather than a statue of a particular figure, would have avoided these difficulties.
We need to think beyond statuary as a limited form of recognition and find ways to celebrate what
is good and joyful without concentrating it upon individual people.
6. Conclusion
In this article I have argued that monuments can be understood as speech acts which communicate
particular messages in the public sphere. Some of those messages derogate particular groups, and
should therefore be blocked in order to minimise harm to already marginalised people. In some
cases, it is also important to preserve any educational value the monument may offer. I have
argued that attempting to recontextualise derogating monuments in situ is not plausible in most
cases, and successfully offsetting their harms and transforming them into genuinely educational
objects by moving them to museums first requires that museums themselves overcome their own
historic tendency to glorify colonialism and other people of colour. I have therefore instead
suggested that such monuments be places within carefully curated exhibitions devoted to
correcting misleading histories around racism and colonialism, or simply toppled and stored until
such a time as British society has confronted the ongoing harms on which its wealth and power is
founded and can more productively engage with objects intended to glorify those harms.
I started this article with Winston Churchill, and I will finish with him. For what it is worth, I
think that his statue in Parliament Square could be preserved in its current location without undue
harm to the various groups he dehumanised and with the benefit of forcing a very public and
enduring reckoning not just with Churchill’s moral shortcomings, but with the ongoing failure of
Britain to face its own history. A simple compromise would allow his disciples to retain their idol
while the rest of us have some balance. In letters large enough to read from a distance, we could
immortalise on his plinth the simple statement the statue has more than once been graffitied with:
“Winston Churchill was a racist.”
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Colonial monuments as slurring speech acts

Article in Journal of Philosophy of Education · August 2021

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Colonial monuments as slurring speech acts

Word count 10750

Keywords monuments, statues, colonialism, history, racism, speech acts.

2. The argument from educational value

3. Monuments as speech acts

A monument is an object that is constructed 3 in order to memorialise an event or a person. Here,

4. Racist monuments and slurring speech acts

The perlocutionary effect or sequel of certain monuments is to contribute to the marginalisation

5. What should we do with racist monuments?

Bolinger, R. J. (2017) ‘The pragmatics of slurs’, Noûs, 51(3), pp. 439–462.

Butler, J. (1997) Excitable Speech. New York & London. Routledge.

Dwyer, O. J. and Alderman, D. H. (2008) ‘Memorial landscapes: analytic questions and

Gilroy, P. (2005) Postcolonial melancholia. Columbia University Press.

Grice, H. P. (1981) ‘Presupposition and conversational implicature’, Radical pragmatics, 183.

Herbert, C. (2018) ‘Talking About Slurs’, Unpublished Manuscript, 21.

Liu, C. (2020) ‘Slurs as illocutionary force indicators’, Philosophia, pp. 1–15.

Ruitenberg, C. W. (2015) ‘Performativity and affect in education’, Philosophical Inquiry in

Scarre, G. (2019) ‘How Memorials Speak to Us’, in Philosophical Perspectives on Ruins,

Shukla, N. (2016) The Good Immigrant. Penguin UK.

UK Government (2020) Letter from Culture Secretary on HM Government position on contested

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