After years of heated debates over statues, museums, and so-called “cancel culture,” the fight over memory and heritage shows no sign of slowing down. Across the world, monuments that once seemed immovable have been toppled, renamed, or removed. In South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, statues of the Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes have already fallen; in Britain, the name of the Sackler family has been stripped from museum galleries, while the Benin Bronzes are finally being returned. Yet each act of change has been met with fierce backlash — accusations of “erasing history,” fears of a slippery slope, and the familiar refrain that culture is under attack.

For Dan Hicks, a professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford and curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, these struggles are not mere “culture wars” but about the weaponization of culture itself. His latest book, Every Monument Will Fall, traces the deep colonial roots of museums, monuments, and memory politics. It exposes how supremacist ideologies were built into the architecture of our cultural institutions — even in grotesque objects like a ceremonial skull cup kept at Oxford University’s Worcester College.

Speaking to Elias Feroz in an interview for Jacobin, Hicks reflects on the colonial origins of British heritage, the politics of naming and un-naming, and why dismantling these inherited structures of power should not be seen in terms of “destruction.”