'What happens in the deep, washes in the shallows': the global afterlives of Lachlan Macquarie

qUCL and GFRN are pleased to welcome Dr Rahul Rao (University of St Andrews) to give their joint annual lecture.

While we work out what to do with bad memorials, what affective and political possibilities for solidarity and resistance are opened up when we tarry with the bad feelings that they produce? Taking the mausoleum of Lachlan Macquarie (a former colonial governor of New South Wales) on the Scottish Isle of Mull as an example, I ask whether injurious memorials – in reminding us of the connections between colony and metropolis – can be made to speak despite themselves, allowing racialised subjects in the metropolis to say, again, 'we are here because you were there'. Such memorials will always be scars on the landscape. Yet their very existence sharpens the contradiction between imperial nostalgia and amnesia – the affects between which the political Right endlessly oscillates.

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Launched in 2014, qUCL is a university-wide initiative that brings together UCL staff and students with research and teaching interests in LGBTQ studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory and related fields.

Gender and Feminisms Research Network (GFRN) aims is to explore the points where gender and feminist politics intersect with a diverse range of power relations and social movements.