There are two very different kinds of monumentality at play here. The book traces how they have unfolded in real time. On the one hand, there are the dead white men whose memory is preserved for posterity with a bronze or marble figure on a plinth or a name above a door. On the other hand, there are the people who are not just forgotten but whose existence has been actively diminished, silenced, erased, redacted, dehumanized even.
The book pieces together the untold history of how a woman’s skull was turned into a kind of chalice and ended up being used to drink out of at Oxford college dinners. When the wear and tear got so much that it leaked, they used it to serve the chocolates — until as recently as 2015. For years it was a sort of open secret at the university. Many find that shocking and disturbing, myself included.
The story is that she was a Caribbean enslaved woman, and the book examines what can and can’t be ascertained about her life. What’s certain is that her memory was not venerated with a statue; instead, her anonymized body was posthumously abused. Indeed, part of the violence took the form of the destruction of her identity, and that violence is also seen in countless numbers of human remains still held in museum collections. In slowly reconstructing the story, the book tells a history of humanization and dehumanization, subjectification and objectification.
I’ve never seen such a seismic shift in public historical consciousness in my lifetime, as the racism, colonial violence, and dispossession of the later 19th and early 20th centuries come into view.
The aim isn’t just to consider how such an obscene tradition could become established (in this case as recently as 1946), but to ask how it is made to endure. The ways in which such endurances happen take many different forms. I talk about the old Althusserian idea of “interpellation” to try to understand the role of personal participation and training.
The skull was…
Auteur: Dan Hicks
