The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire

From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. Author Rahul Rao offers an insightful exploration of these global controversies, demonstrating that more profound struggles over race, caste, and the politics of decolonization lie beneath their surface.

Rao takes readers through South Africa, England, the US, Ghana, India, Australia, and Scotland, revealing how statue controversies have dramatically rearranged the canon of anticolonial political thought. Rao addresses the multifaceted issues of justice, cultural memory, and belonging by examining these debates through a personal and literary lens.

The Psychic Lives of Statues examines both the toppling of colonial statues and the raising of postcolonial ones, demonstrating that the statue form as a medium of representation and a bid for immortality is by no means obsolete. Engaging with artists, scholars, and activists, Rao provides fresh perspectives on how societies grapple with and reinterpret the past and present through iconography.