Unnaming buildings

Abstract

This is an essay that explores the phenomenon of stripping dedicatory names—commemorative toponyms—from buildings, particularly on university campuses, but with the wider lens of thinking through renaming more generally. It comes out of my experience as a faculty member at U.C. Berkeley, where a number of buildings have been—or are in the process of being—renamed. The essay uses a building named after the eminent Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber—and recently unnamed, but not yet renamed—as the point of departure for exploring the various arguments for unnaming, as well as preserving names on buildings. Along the way, it investigates issues of what constitutes history or institutional memory, whether toponyms can be understood as free speech, and how institutions use unnaming to perform cultural work that is only peripherally about memory.