BISR Live: Memory, Monuments, and the Garden of American Heroes

Faculty Shimrit Lee, Patrick Blanchfield, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary gather to discuss Trump’s Garden of American Heroes and its accompanying mandate that “All statues…should be lifelike or realistic…not abstract or modernist representations.” What are we to make of the politics of aesthetic literalism? Why might the Right opt for realism—and has it always? What’s at stake in contests over representation, monuments, and cultural memory?