Monuments, Place Names and Black Lives Matter: Memorialising Captain James Cook

Abstract

In this article I consider how the body of the historical figure Captain James Cook is available for consumption and commemoration every day on Indigenous lands connected by the Pacific Ocean. Consuming Cook’s memorialised body is a discursive form of cannibalism. As I have argued elsewhere, the complex relations between objects and people by which national identity, relationships and values are expressed do so within an order of things discursively configured through the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty. These racialised and gendered possessive logics circulate sets of meanings and presuppositions as part of vernacular knowledge, decision making and socially produced conventions fortifying institutional structures such as the law. As is illustrated, statues, monuments and place names tied to Captain James Cook are things imbued with meaning in everyday life. As public secrets, they stand as tangible and intangible evidence of the continuing colonial legacy of white possession and Indigenous dispossession; the knowing what not to know. Evidence that signifies dead white male bodies will be remembered and dead Indigenous bodies will be forgotten. This signification is transferred onto which living bodies matter in Australia.