Abstract
This chapter uses the ‘local’ as a methodological framework to explore imperial hegemonies in the iconography, location, and history of a monument: sculptor George Frampton’s 1905 Queen Victoria Memorial in the city of Leeds, England. It is divided into sections on geography, space, and time, which analyse how the monument was designed to work as a local extension of the imperial project. Focusing on interventions by artists, activists, and citizens, it analyses the destruction of monuments commemorating whitewashed versions of British colonial history as transformative acts of visual vandalism and how creative interventions have challenged the status of Frampton's monument as a relic of localised British imperialism.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Henry Moore Foundation and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for their generous support, along with Samra and all the artists who participated in the Commemorative Space project.
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Senior, R. (2023). Local Empire: George Frampton’s Leeds Queen Victoria Memorial. In: Carlson, B., Farrelly, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28609-4_26
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