Drawing on a range of disciplines from within the humanities and social sciences, Multilingual Memories addresses questions of remembering and forgetting from an explicitly multilingual perspective. From a museum at Victoria Falls in Zambia to a Japanese-American internment in Arkansas, this book probes how the medium of the communication of memories affirms social orders across the globe. Applying linguistic landscape approaches to a wide variety of monuments and memorials from around the world, this book identifies how multilingualism (and its absence) contributes to the inevitable partiality of public memorials. Using a number of different methods, including multimodal discourse analysis, code preferences, interaction orders, and indexicality, the chapters explore how memorials have the potential to erase linguistic diversity as much as they can entextualize multilingualism. With examples from Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and North and South America, this volume also examines the extent to which multilingual memories legitimize not only specific discourses but also individuals, particular communities, and ethno-linguistic groups - often to the detriment of others.

Monuments around the world have become the focus of intense and sustained discussions, activism, vandalism, and removal. Since the convulsive events of 2015 and 2017, during which white supremacists committed violence in the shadow of Confederate symbols, and the 2020 nationwide protests against racism and police brutality, protesters and politicians in the United States have removed Confederate monuments, as well as monuments to historical figures like Christopher Columbus and Dr. J. Marion Sims, questioning their legitimacy as present-day heroes that their place in the public sphere reinforces. The essays included in this anthology offer guidelines and case studies tailored for students and teachers to demonstrate how monuments can be used to deepen civic and historical engagement and social dialogue. Essays analyze specific controversies throughout North America with various outcomes as well as examples of monuments that convey outdated or unwelcome value systems without prompting debate.