This study offers a typology of mediated de-commemoration—how acts of de-commemoration are represented and mobilized through cultural products. Drawing on the analysis of cultural products centered on the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, England (2020), the research identifies four types of mediated de-commemoration: Justification—establishing moral grounds for the toppling; Reflecting division—presenting the toppling as social cleavage to mitigate polarization; Vernacular appropriation and Amplification—asserting the toppling as a local radical act to mobilize solidarity; De-exceptionalization—challenging the toppling’s singularity by situating it within ongoing activism to shift focus toward its broader meaning. This typology reveals how various actors engage with and reinterpret de-commemoration acts for different purposes, demonstrating temporal aspects of these mediations and their interaction with public discourse, government actions, and one another. The study provides critical insights into how memory activism, when mobilized as memory of activism, becomes a site of competing meanings.
Carmit Wolberg (Tue,) studied this question.