Empty Pedestals

"Empty Pedestals: Countering Confederate Monuments through Public Design uses a design perspective to explore how monuments to the Confederacy speak to regionalism, racist agendas, and residual pain. Many public designers and artists engaged in the public realm have created innovative projects to replace Confederate monuments, contextualize those that continue to stand, and foster new conversations about history, race, and justice in America. By drawing lessons from these projects and considering the questions that remain, editors Kofi Boone and M. Elen Deming hope to assist design and art educators and students to combat endemic racism and other forms of social division. For well over a century, the endurance of Confederate monuments, street names, and other memorial symbols in the United States has permitted a set of false and oppressive narratives to be defended in the name of 'historic preservation.' Their continuing presence maintains symbolic forms of systemic oppression, exclusionary policies and practices, and erasure of the stories, memories, and values of marginalized communities in the South. While many Confederate monuments have been removed since 2017, those removals comprise only a small percentage of the overall symbolic presence of the Confederate past in the American South. In Empty Pedestals, Boone and Deming strive to find new frameworks and shared solutions for the issues that continue to trouble American social landscapes. Above all, the book lifts up the stories of communities that have confronted Confederate monuments and devised solutions that stand up to, and apart from, old mythologies. When and if oppressive symbols like Confederate monuments are determined not to be worth preserving, the public needs to understand what kind of design alternatives may offer healing in public spaces, healthier social discourse, and stronger community resilience"--