In the last two centuries BC, with the Republic limping towards its end, the cultivated ruling elite began to lose its moral and political authority.1 Its members not only held themselves responsible for the so-called crisis of tradition, but at the same time also conveyed the impression of a loss of memory, as if all Romans were suffering from some kind of amnesia or identity crisis.2 In particular, institutional figures such as pontiffs and augurs, who had preserved Rome’s memory throughout its history, were accused of neglecting their duties and, by extension, of allowing ancient practices and values to slowly disappear.3 Accordingly, Cicero and Varro, both perfect representatives of this elite, employed recurrent terms such as neglect (neglegentia/neglegere), involuntary abandon (amittere), oblivion (oblivio), vanishing of institutions (evanescere), and ignorance (ignoratio/ignorare) to describe this critical loss of information; they depicted the citizenry of Rome (civitas) as disoriented and estranged, incapable of sharing any common knowledge or values.

In the early first century AD, the democratic institutions of Athens dedicated an honorary statue to the Roman senator Lucius Cassius Longinus.1 In the process, they re-used a monument consisting of a bronze statue and a marble base from the Classical period.2 Elsewhere, I have investigated why Athenians rededicated such old statues to Roman senators in this period. I have shown that old statues, that is statues from the Classical (and Hellenistic) period, were particularly suitable honours for Roman benefactors because of their shape and the cultural memory attached to them. I have detailed the manner in which they were employed as a political strategy both to engage powerful Romans and to manoeuvre them into a position of patronage and support for the city.

The Introduction to this book establishes Faulkner’s interest in writing materials as both a theme in his work and in his own writing and publishing career. Faulkner began his career not as a fiction writer but as a poet and illustrator, making his own handmade books, some for sale and others for friends and love interests. He maintained this attention throughout his life to the physical forms taken by his books. The Introduction sets forth the stakes of the book as a whole. Over and against a persistent technological determinism in cultural and media studies, William Faulkner and the Materials of Writing shows how Faulkner can help us think through the way in which media can only be understood in the context of its use. The telegraph, for example, works no faster than the mail if a telegram is not delivered to the intended recipient or otherwise goes unread. The Introduction also introduces three broad sets of concerns that will be central in the chapters that follow: The relationship of the individual to media forms; the connections of media with race, gender, and intimacy; and an understanding of writing as both text and thing in the world.

Chapter 1 starts by tracing the archaeology of carpe diem. Rather than speculating about the origin of a motif that is already attested in Akkadian and Egyptian sources, this chapter looks at the Greeks’ own discourse of the past and how they constructed the origins of the motif. The focus of the chapter is the hedonistic epitaph of the legendary last king of Assyria, Sardanapallus. Greeks were fascinated with this foreign carpe diem text which seemed to precede their own history. In fact, however, it was by misunderstanding this foreign monument that they recreated its text; lurking behind Sardanapallus’ Assyrian orgy are Greek banquets and the present tense of performative Greek lyric. The chapter shows that the Sardanapallus epitaph allows for fascinating insights into Greek ways of reading epigrams. As the chapter discusses the reception of the Sardanapallus epitaph in authors such as Callimachus, Crates, Chrysippus, Alexis, and Rabirius, it shows how one of Epicurus’ detractors forges a false link between Epicurus and carpe diem, when he changes one word of the epitaph.

The Unton Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, London, is among the most famous representations of memory and mortality in early modern England. It depicts Sir Henry Unton (c. 1558–1596), his life and death. This chapter argues that the Unton Memorial Picture deserves to be reconsidered not primarily as a narrative of Unton’s life and death, but as a meditation on memory and mortality. Analysis of the spatial organisation of the portrait shows how early modern English elite culture approached the arts of death in the wake of the Reformation. Equal weight was given to life, death and its attendant rituals, and to the afterlife, including the fate of body, soul, and memory. Close reading of the architecture and imagery of Unton’s monument as depicted in the portrait demonstrates that the tomb was at the forefront of the stylistic development of English sepulchral art. This allows the portrait to be redated to around 1606, a decade after the death of its subject, and understood as part of a programmatic approach to Unton’s memory authored by his widow Dorothy. The chapter contributes to development of a theory of memory and commemoration authentic to the English Renaissance.

This introductory chapter situates the current study within the existing literature on the contested events of 1857 and highlights how a focus on the way in which the conflict became an almost obsessively commemorated event in colonial and postcolonial contexts can help us better understand a range of questions pertaining to identity, legitimacy, and power as successive generations (re)produced and (re)packaged the past for mass consumption in the constantly evolving present. In so doing, this chapter also outlines the methodological framework which will inform the study as a whole. Drawing on sociological accounts of ‘collective memory’, this chapter develops a socially grounded understanding of the relationship between memory and forgetting, and explains how practices of commemoration provide a moment in which this dynamic is played out.

The concluding chapter of this study brings together the central arguments which have been made over the course of the book and asks what broader relevance they have for our understanding of key concepts including memory, forgetting, commemoration, empire, and anxiety before going on to consider future lines of study which will add to our understanding of the role of commemoration in colonial and postcolonial settings.

In the year when France commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of its territory from Nazi rule by the Allied Forces, President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal initiated a commemoration of the contribution that the Tirailleurs sénégalais made to this military victory. Inviting the heads of different African states whose colonial subjects had joined the colonial army of Tirailleurs, the Day of the Tirailleur was celebrated on 23 August 2004 to commemorate the day of the landing at Toulon. In the Senegalese media, the ‘blood debt’ of France to its African liberators was widely debated, and the discrimination in pensions that African veterans have experienced since political independence was widely condemned. During the day, a statue of the soldiers Demba and Dupont was unveiled at its new location to recognize the contribution Africans have made to France’s military history. This colonial statue was first inaugurated in 1923 to recognize the role played by Tirailleurs in the First World War; it is now recycled to remind France of its colonial debt. The Day of the Tirailleur reminded France of its obligations towards the Senegalese migrants in France whose legal status was very much debated at the time. By reinstating a colonial statue and recycling the social capital made by sacrifice, the Senegalese government appropriated and reinterpreted African history, recycling its colonial legacy as a technique of repair.

The Prologue discusses the fall of the statue of General Louis Faidherbe in Saint-Louis, Senegal. The statue was placed in the main square of Saint-Louis in 1886 but was toppled in 2017. Although the perpetrators of this act of iconoclasm were unknown, the toppling of the statue was acclaimed by some of the town’s population. The mayor of Saint-Louis nonetheless restored the statue to its former position, defending the colonial heritage of a city that owes its existence to the French empire. However, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the statue of Faidherbe once again became the subject of heated debates in the national media. Considered by some as the founder of modern Senegal, others denounce Faidherbe as a perpetrator of colonial violence. The Prologue examines how the legacy of this key figure in the history of colonialism is assessed today. Considering the question of responsibility as key to this debate, the Prologue questions the usefulness of the categories of perpetrators and victims in the history of colonialism. Following Michael Rothberg, it studies the decolonization of heritage using his concept of implicated subjects.

This chapter explores the reception strategies of metrical inscriptions on statues and other monuments from the turn of the fifth to the fourth cent. BCE found at Xanthos in Lycia – and recently in Caria. They offer a insights into the practice of composing encomia for powerful dynasts and prominent addressees through the medium of hexameters, elegiac couplets, and trochaic tetrameters. In that respect, they call for close comparison with the lyric encomiastic poetry composed in the late archaic and early classical period by poets such as Ibycus, Pindar, and Bacchylides for powerful military and political rulers and patrons. Four of these inscriptional texts display a feature which is extremely rare in archaic poetry and is not found in all the other extant metrical inscriptions down to the 4th century BCE: the signature bearing the name of the poet. This chapter interprets the poet’s signature as a way of stressing the bond between poet and patron/addressee in a different way from the lyric practice, and stresses the new strategy of praise entailed by these inscriptions, by combining the visual power of the monuments with the power of the poet’s words.

This chapter examines the post-Reformation afterlives of churchyard, wayside and market crosses. It explores how they were implicated in the Protestant war against idols alongside the manner in which many were recycled for alternative purposes, probing the new layers of meaning they acquired as they were modified and the contested legacies they left to the generations that inherited them. Particular attention is paid to crosses upon whose decapitated pedestals subsequently became the base for sundials. It argues that crosses converted into timekeepers not merely illuminate the interconnections between memory and materiality, space and temporality, in post-Reformation culture. They also offer insight into the evolving concept of the ‘monument’ itself. They afford a glimpse of the process by which things designed to provoke remembrance became things worthy of preservation as historic artefacts themselves. They became signposts to a disappearing past that had to be fossilised lest it be lost.