"...Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984
Fascinating piece that articulates a lot of the discomfort I have felt about the public renaming of spaces. Clearly this is a performative gesture by the mayor to signal London’s growing estrangement from the rest of Britain both in terms of identity and therefore History that it chooses to curate. The risk of historical amnesia is profound and massively underappreciated especially for the designated marginalised groups – how do you explain the struggle against empire if the memory of empire has been removed? The second thing that strikes me is how this name check to the constituent elements of the ‘progressive’ alliance reminds us this is in effect a patchwork quilt not a garment woven into a single piece of cloth. Each of these groups have received their own designated recognition rather than identifying with a unifying symbol or person, so that not only is this about differentiating the ‘progressives’ against a supposedly privileged hegemonic mainstream, it points to the segregation of Politics loyalties, and even reflected in our public spaces.
You are pointing in the right direction. Slowly but surely we are heading towards the institutionalisation of social amnesia.
"...Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984
Fascinating piece that articulates a lot of the discomfort I have felt about the public renaming of spaces. Clearly this is a performative gesture by the mayor to signal London’s growing estrangement from the rest of Britain both in terms of identity and therefore History that it chooses to curate. The risk of historical amnesia is profound and massively underappreciated especially for the designated marginalised groups – how do you explain the struggle against empire if the memory of empire has been removed? The second thing that strikes me is how this name check to the constituent elements of the ‘progressive’ alliance reminds us this is in effect a patchwork quilt not a garment woven into a single piece of cloth. Each of these groups have received their own designated recognition rather than identifying with a unifying symbol or person, so that not only is this about differentiating the ‘progressives’ against a supposedly privileged hegemonic mainstream, it points to the segregation of Politics loyalties, and even reflected in our public spaces.