R WE LOUD ENOUGH?: Re-inscribing monuments in the public sphere by the Black Lives Matter movement

Abstract

This article applies a multimodal analysis to explore the potential meanings attached to the re-inscriptions of public monuments and spaces produced during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Specific attention is given to several contentious examples: the George Floyd Memorial in Minneapolis, Winston Churchill’s statue in London, and the Queen Victoria statue in Leeds. We reflect on the ephemerality of protest re-inscriptions and how they receive a multimodal ‘second-life’ through their (re)presentations in mainstream/social media. Although institutions of power are quick to remove subversive re-inscriptions from the public sphere, we note that the portrait mural of George Floyd continues to function as a universal shrine to the injustices experienced by the wider Black community. A memorial space which is allowed to linger until its promised transubstantiation into George Perry Floyd Jr Place. In contrast, the other BLM re-inscriptions analysed in this article have now been removed from the physical public sphere, in which their transient messages of protest and public pedagogy will have in some cases been privately and publicly archived digitally on the internet; where evidence is much harder to remove than the public sphere.