Black Lives Matter: A View from Europe

Kathleen James-Chakraborty, University College Dublin

Black Lives Matter began in the United States, where it has included the dismantlement of commemorations of the Confederacy, a breakaway state established to preserve slavery. In Europe it has sparked discussions of local monuments as well as drawn unprecedented attention to the way in which the slave trade and slave labour funded the construction of cities and country estates. This now needs to be acknowledged in public space. The challenge presents an appropriate moment to remember the ties that bind commemorative structures on both sides of the Atlantic and the impact that tributes to European nationalism have had on diverse strands of modern American architecture. These connections provide a back story for the newly discovered relevance, and at time effectiveness, of representational sculpture, which they integrated into built forms that appeared to embed regimes of all stripes in their local landscapes. Abstract counter-monuments often proved effective in addressing the Holocaust. Substituting the human figure for the shards of a shattered past that have long been juxtaposed in German memoryscapes with visions of a utopian future, may possibly provide a means of acknowledging the pain that runs through the cities that many of us inhabit. This in turn may prove to be an important step on the way to building the more equitable future for which we attempt to prepare the way as we work to decolonize our curricula.

Biography

Kathleen James-Chakraborty has been Professor of Art History at University College Dublin since 2007. A graduate of Yale, James-Chakraborty earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at the University of California Berkeley, where she reached the rank of full professor, at the Ruhr University Bochum, where she was a Mercator guest professor, and at the Yale School of Architecture, where she was the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History. In 2019 she received the Gold Medal in the Humanities from the Royal Irish Academy. She organised the fourth international conference of the European Architectural History Network, held in Dublin Castle on 2-4 June 2016. James-Chakraborty’s books include Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge, 1997), German Architecture for a Mass Audience (Routledge, 2000), Architecture since 1400 (Minnesota, 2014; Guangxi, 2017), and Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (Minnesota, 2018), which was short-listed for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion. She is the editor of India in Art in Ireland (Routledge, 2016) and Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War (Minnesota, 2006). Her articles have appeared in German Politics and Society, the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and New German Critique. She has contributed to the catalogues of exhibitions held at the Barbican (London), Folkwang Museum (Essen), the German Architectural Museum (Frankfurt), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Architecture Biennale (Venice), as well as more than a dozen edited books. In April, she was awarded an Advanced ERC

grant for a project entitled ‘Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture.’