Published May 2025

EVERY MONUMENT WILL FALL: A STORY OF REMEMBERING & FORGETTING

HUTCHINSON HEINEMANN

 There’s a culture war, we’re told. Or maybe it’s a war on culture – a war with a deeper and more troubling history than you might think.

Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, colonialism and memory, Dan Hicks joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the acquisition of stolen art and ancestral human remains.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, Every Monument Will Fall pulls at a thread that runs through this history – from country houses in the Yorkshire Wolds to Caribbean plantations and from the battlefields of Crimea and the American Civil War to British colonial outposts in southern Ireland. The book holds the memorialisations of men like Cecil Rhodes and General Augustus Pitt-Rivers up against the writing of Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall and Ursula Le Guin, drawing together open secrets about dehumanisation and the redaction of public memory.

What emerges is a speculative history of inheritance, loss, collective mourning, and the possibility of a reconciliation that has not yet begun. This is a story about who gets named and who doesn’t, who is remembered and who is forgotten; who has been treated as human and who has not.

Refusing to choose between pulling down every single statue, or holding onto every last vestige of a past that future generations could never change, Every Monument Will Fall makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while. The result is an urgent appeal to reassemble the fragments, listen to the silences, value life and humanity above material things – and to rebuild a new kind of memory culture.

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Advance Praise for Every Monument WIll Fall

  • "Every Monument Will Fall is an extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource"

    — Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities, UCL

  • "“Urgent and insightful, Every Monument Will Fall challenges all our presumptions about global history by taking us on a radical tour through the colonial archive.” 

    — Dr Kojo Koram, University of London Birkbeck

  • "Hicks writes with grace and fierce focus about what we choose to remember and why, in our patterns of thought, our institutions and the built environment in which we live"

    — Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London

  • "Brave and clear-sighted. Hicks opens up an extraordinary conversation between the past and the present. This is a book about falling statues, but so much more. It’s about how we’ve been lied to, and how we can approach the past with honesty. Hicks asks whether history and archaeology should be used to justify actions we know impinge on the rights of others - or to understand ourselves better"

    — Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham

  • ‘An astonishing tour de force. Every Monument Will Fall brilliantly propels us through a history of the interlocking lives of the people—writers, soldiers, academics, white supremacists—who mired the discipline of anthropology in racial violence and imperial longing. In weaving together archival research, critical theory, and biographic narrative with the urgency of a polemicist and in stark metaphors of weaponry and warfare, Hicks restores voice and form to the human subjects who these anthropologists have tried their best to dehumanise and destroy. A powerful follow-up to The Brutish Museums, Every Monument Will Fall will inspire scholars, writers, artists, and activists to challenge the monumental institutions of modernity—the university, the museum, and history itself.’

    — Isaac Julien, Distinguished Professor of the Arts, University of California Santa Cruz

  • “‘Every Monument Will Fall is a reckoning, or better phrased, a wrecking ball to the structural myths that uphold the museum and the monument in western democracies whose spoils are the result of pillage, colonialism, and captivity. A brilliant cross genre text, Every Monument Will Fall is at once rigorous art criticism, intellectual history, critical theory, and an epistolary addressed (in a project about redress and demolishment) to himself as the author, to a composite figure of the western human, to those absorbed into whiteness, to the subject of historical narrative, to the biographical figures who inaugurate the monuments and museums, and those who orchestrate their demise."

    — Nicole Fleetwood, Paulette Goddard Endowed Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

  • "A must-read book. Read it to see why the media adulation of aristocracy and monarchy conceals the long history of British state violence, slavery and racism. Read it to learn new ways to be anti-racist, abolitionist and to tell other stories than those commemorated by the monuments that surround us, from statues, to museums and the police"

    — Nick Mirzoeff, Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU and author of White Sight