On the geographies of monuments and migration memory-making

Abstract

Within the burgeoning geographical literature on public memory, a subset centres on what monuments can inform us about the complex realities of migrants whose lives often straddle between two (or more) nations, thus giving rise to trans-cultural and trans-local dynamics that exceed (and may even potentially challenge) the nation. This paper examines monuments established to presence the former-exiled-turned-migrant Moluccan community in the Netherlands to proverbially fold them into the Dutch population, and celebrate alterity in the context of pluralism. And yet, it also frames how these monuments reflect the limits and paradoxes of such an endeavour particularly by virtue of the fraught relationships – due to hitherto unresolved pasts but also tense presents – between the Moluccans and their host societies; as well as fault-lines – owing to myriad intersecting geographies astride religion, generational axes, socio-spatial variations, political affiliations or connections to original homelands – that exist among these Moluccans today, even as they may be born into (or have attained) citizenship status. More broadly, the paper puts into question the extent that public monuments, as a specific material commemorative genre, may in fact be appropriate for remembering phenomena typically associated with postcolonial mobility, diversity and flux.