1 1 Author version. Please cite final published version here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/article/926818 The Things of Order Affect, Material Culture, Dispositif Donovan O. Schaefer Introduction: Affect and Ceremony In early 2016, a high school student in Charlottesville, Virginia, petitioned her city council to remove a monument in a local park. The bronze equestrian, erected almost one hundred years earlier, depicted Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The student argued that the statue made the park forbidding and alienating to the city’s Black residents. A year and a half later, a coalition of neo-Confederates and far-right activists—reacting to the council’s vote to remove the statue in the wake of this petition—stormed the park and its surrounding neighborhood, ultimately murdering a counter-protestor in the ensuing violence. In July of 2021, after a series of legislative actions and court challenges at the city and state levels, the council removed the statue. Two years later, the Charlottesville Lee monument was melted down by the Swords Into Plowshares project, a Charlottesville community organization that, as of this writing, intends to reuse the bronze for a future monument that reflects antiracist values (Armus and Green). The location of the foundry and the names of its proprietor and workers were kept secret for their safety. 1 Commenting on Frantz Fanon’s account of the material culture of colonialism, Achille Mbembe describes the colony as a war zone, a contest of forces, in which “sensory life”—the continuum of bodies, objects, and landscape—is itself a battlefield. “Colonial domination,” he writes, “requires an enormous investment in affect and ceremony and a significant emotional expenditure that few have analyzed until now” (Mbembe 2017, 114; emphasis added). In the contemporary moment, monuments and memorials have become flashpoints in the culture wars smoldering across the face of the globe. From Johannesburg to Charlottesville to Oxford to Sydney to Kyiv, public material culture is now the scene of a collision of competing agendas as activists seek to reshape sweeping assemblages of power. As Mbembe predicts, this has everything to do with the ongoing force field of conquest, colonization, and racism. Disputes about public culture become contests about who has the capacity to project themselves as publics—and who is sidelined, denied access, and excluded. Monuments become nodes of race and power, affect and ceremony. The controversies around Confederate monuments in the twenty-first century are often framed as if statues are, in essence, three-dimensional speech. After the New Orleans