Rumors ofWar: Towards the unsettling of the Confederate monumental landscape

Abstract

On September 8, 2021, the Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond, Virginia was removed—the final Confederate monument to be toppled on Monument Avenue, the one-and-a-half-mile boulevard dedicated to Confederate memory. Two years prior, Kehinde Wiley unveiled Rumors of War, a 27-foot-tall and 16- foot-wide bronze statue showing a young Black man with dreadlocks atop a horse in a hoodie, ripped jeans, and Nikes. Permanently installed outside of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the monument was created to contest the equestrian monuments on Monument Avenue, questioning the historical ideology behind such a representation in the nettlesome geography of Richmond. This paper shows the ways that the monument served as a preface and rallying cry to the contestations and monument removal that would take place on Monument Avenue in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by unpacking the ways in which it lays bare the relationship between white supremacy and the symbolic landscape within the former Confederate capital. In this, I also consider Rumors of War’s role three years after its erection, extending its meaning beyond a historical clap-back or cultural unbundling by critically engaging the history of black equestrians and placing the work in a global context that surpasses any geographic specificity, as it reveals the unseen realities that reverberate from Richmond across the world: from slavery, colonialism, and segregation of the past to the systemic racism and police brutality of today.