A Monument in Conflict: Transnational Resistance and the Politics of Commemoration in La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers's I am Queen Mary

Abstract In 2018, artists La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers unveiled I Am Queen Mary on the Copenhagen waterfront, an imposing 23-foot-tall monument to Mary Thomas, a leader of the 1878 Fireburn labor revolt in the Danish West Indies. As Denmark's first public commemoration of its colonial past, the monument intervenes in the European paradigm of memorialization by foregrounding Black women's resistance. This essay argues that I Am Queen Mary functions as a “guerrilla monument,” borrowing Alan Rice's concept of guerrilla memorialization to describe bottom-up acts of remembrance. Drawing on Vincent Brown, Paul Gilroy, Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer Morgan, and Michael Rothberg, it situates the monument within transnational memory cultures that confront the colonial archive's silences around Black women. While the work's figurative form and references to the Black Panther Party complicate its feminist ambitions, the monument stages a dialogue between Caribbean and Danish histories of labor, race, and commemoration. The debates it provokes underscore the tensions of transnational memory where competing expectations converge around what the monument should look like and signify. I Am Queen Mary emerges as a contested site of remembrance exemplifying the possibilities and frictions of guerrilla commemoration from below.