Macomb must fall: Geographies of conquest

Abstract

This article analyses the statue of General Alexander Macomb, which has stood at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and Michigan Avenue in downtown Detroit since the early 1900s. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of controversy about the statue and the connections of Alexander Macomb to settler–colonial genocide and racial slavery, a dispute which connects larger struggles over controversial monuments to the Black Lives Matter and Idle No More movements. To analyse the rhetorical work of the statue, I engage Richard Marback’s theories of the material rhetoric of monuments in colonial and urban space alongside studies by Katherine McKittrick and others on the relation between settler colonialism and anti-Black racism, to situate the statue within a larger grammar of racial–colonial power that organizes the political geography of the Great Lakes region. Ultimately, I argue that the General Alexander Macomb statue and other colonial monuments serve as nodes binding together material and symbolic geographies of power and suturing slavery to settler colonialism.