Every Monument Will Fall. A Story of Remembering and Forgetting by Dan Hicks

In Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting, Dan Hicks extends his decolonial critique of museums, established in The Brutish Museums, to the monumental landscape of Oxford. The book ambitiously interrogates the persistence of colonial structures, analysing monuments that symbolically stand and fall at once. Drawing on a broad theoretical framework from Cultural, Black, Feminist, and Queer studies, Hicks traces the “killer story” of enslavement and its archival and financial legacies within elite institutions. While positioning his own workplace as a “latent weapon” holding violence, Hicks’s intervention is critically assessed as hampered by a methodological misalignment. The analysis, focused on retracing the oppressor's historiography, paradoxically narrows its scope, often revolving recursively around the historical figures it critiques. Consequently, the work engages in performative self-criticism but falters in moving beyond critique to articulate the concrete, praxis-oriented decolonial interventions its framework implicitly demands.