Future Anterior approaches historic preservation from a position of critical inquiry, rigorous scholarship, and theoretical analysis. Guest edited by Aron Vinegar, this second special issue on rethinking the monument centers on the provocation: what would preservation be in the absence of monuments? Its essays forcefully demonstrate that monuments should not be primarily engaged with modes of self-preservation, but instead involved in generating myriad acts of preservation—as complex amalgams of preservation’s rhythmic and temporal forces, which simultaneously invoke, gather, disperse, circulate, destroy, and create multiple worlds, (transnational) communities, “theres,” and beginnings.

Contributors to this issue include Anna Neimark, Paul Wilson, Edward Eigen, Peter C. van Wyck, Tülay Atak, Stuart Burch, Damiana Lucia Paternò, and Giulia Ceriani Sebregondi.