"Statuomania" overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands across their French colony. The afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France, legally or clandestinely, draw on colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Monuments offer visual records of the colonized Algerian native, the European settler colonizer, and the contemporary efforts to engage with a dark colonial past. The increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate earlier settler colonial histories means that today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving the contested, yet shared monumental heritage.

Co-sponsored with the Department of Middle East Studies