Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument

Prescott, Cynthia; Rees, Nathan; Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca

doi:10.3390/h10010041

Submit to this Journal Review for this Journal Edit a Special Issue

Article Menu

...

Open AccessArticle

Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument

Cynthia Prescott

^1,*

Nathan Rees

and

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

^3,*

Department of History, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND 58202, USA

Department of Art, History, and Philosophy, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA 30117, USA

Department of English, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24060, USA

Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Humanities 2021, 10(1), 41; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010041

Received: 15 January 2021 / Revised: 10 February 2021 / Accepted: 22 February 2021 / Published: 2 March 2021

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender, Race and the Material Culture)

View Full-Text Download PDF

Browse Figures

Review Reports Citation Export

Abstract

This essay examines two monuments: the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa and the American This is the Place Monument in Utah. Similar in terms of construction and historical purpose, both employ gender as an important tool to legitimize the settler society each commemorates. Each was part of a similar project of cultural recuperation in the 1930s−1940s that chose as their object of commemoration the overland migration in covered wagons of a group of white settlers that felt oppressed by other white settlers, and therefore sought a new homeland. In a precarious cultural moment, descendants of these two white settler societies—the Dutch Voortrekkers of South Africa and Euro-American Mormons (Latter-day Saints or LDS) of Utah—undertook massive commemoration projects to memorialize their ancestors’ 1830s−1840s migrations into the interior, holding Afrikaners and Mormons up as the most worthy settler groups among each nation’s white population. This essay will argue that a close reading of these monuments reveals how each white settler group employed gendered depictions that were inflected by class and race in their claims to be the true heart of their respective settler societies, despite perceiving themselves as oppressed minorities. View Full-Text

Keywords: monuments; the Voortrekker Monument; This is the Place Monument; Mormon; Latter day Saints; Afrikaner; Boer; settler; memorialization; whiteness

▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Share and Cite

MDPI and ACS Style

Prescott, C.; Rees, N.; Weaver-Hightower, R. Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument. Humanities 2021, 10, 41. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010041

AMA Style

Prescott C, Rees N, Weaver-Hightower R. Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument. Humanities. 2021; 10(1):41. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010041

Chicago/Turabian Style

Prescott, Cynthia, Nathan Rees, and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower. 2021. "Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument" Humanities 10, no. 1: 41. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010041

Find Other Styles

Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.

Article Metrics

Abstract views Pdf views Html views

Article Menu

Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument

Abstract

Share and Cite

Article Metrics

Article Access Statistics

Article Access Map by Country/Region

Author Biographies

Further Information

Guidelines

MDPI Initiatives

Follow MDPI