The Everyday Life of Memorials

Zone Books, 2022

Analyzing their relationship to the pulses of daily life, Professor of Architecture and Director of American Studies Andrew M. Shanken investigates the fixture of memorials within modern cities in his latest book, The Everyday Life of Memorials.

Shanken’s book is a study of the habits of placement and the meaning of where memorials end up, get moved, and are given new meanings by being absorbed into the everyday. His close historical readings of memorials, both well-known and obscure, and his plumbing of quotidian experience bring two distinct strands of scholarship together: the study of the everyday and memory. From the introduction of modern memorials in the wake of the French Revolution, through the recent destruction of Confederate monuments, memorials have oscillated between the everyday and the “not-everyday.” In fact, they have helped constitute the very structure of these categories, particularly within the development of modern cities.

The Everyday Life of Memorials reveals how indeterminate these supposedly permanent interventions are, how they get turned on and turned off, slipping between the ordinary and extraordinary. Finally, observing how people behave at memorials and what memorials ask of us shows just how strange the commemorative infrastructure of modernity is. The book combines archival and fieldwork, mostly in Europe and the United States, but its insights can be applied globally.