REGENT’S NOW FEATURES
Old Faces in New Frames:
The past, the present, and our college portraits Dr Leif Dixon
I
t must be a confusing time to be a portrait or a statute. For decades you sat there, largely ignored, just part of the metaphorical furniture. And yet today your existence is either a profound affront to all modern values, or conversely your removal from public view would represent the end of civilisation as we know it. It is no less confusing to be a watcher of these historical representations. The Victorian scientist, Thomas Henry Huxley – long lauded as a progressive advocate of evolution, secularism, and women’s education – has been publicly disassociated from a London university building because he was about as racist as most other Victorian academics. Four protestors have just been acquitted for toppling a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston – an action which, they cleverly argued, has actually increased its historical and monetary value. And yet Rhodes still stands, larger than life; and yet is now accompanied by a tiny plaque describing him as a ‘committed colonialist.’ Compromises are sometimes good. And sometimes not. When a professional historian thinks that a person in the past is not as significant as was once thought, the result is that they stop being written about. By an osmosis of scholarly neglect, they simply recede from view. But it is not so easy with historical commemorations because they are already here, demanding to be seen in a way that books never demand to be read. They therefore create a pointed cultural problem for us because inaction represents a value judgement and decision in itself. To actively remove these representations of (or lightning rods to) historical values and narratives that we may now find offensive or simply no longer relevant, risks charges of historical vandalism. To stick with them, however, prompts the accusation that we are still celebrating things that we now know to be sexist or racist. There are no easy solutions. Along with several colleagues – most prominently Drs Chris Joynes and Kate Kirkpatrick – I’ve been asked to help us to review our portraits and, more to the point, to help us to achieve a shared framework for thinking about what is and isn’t appropriate for historical commemorations in the future. Unfortunately, though, the wider cultural debate about these issues has become polarised. Two extremes, in particular, need to be challenged.
REGENT’S PARK COLLEGE
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OXFORD
