Goodnight Colston. Mourning Slavery: Death Rites and Duppy Conquering in a Circum-Atlantic City

Abstract

In the wake of the riotous procession that toppled the statue of Edward Colston, this essay sketches an ethnographic itinerary through the spectral geographies of Bristol, a circum-Atlantic city haunted by the ghosts of slavery. The paper offers a Caribbean cosmological reading of the toppling and aqueous burial as a kind of duppy conquering, a vital act of social renewal that clears ground for processes of spiritual and affective repair. The paper then explores two rituals of restoration—a remembrance ceremony for an enslaved woman and an inchoate ancestral invocation upon an empty plinth—alongside other, kindred paths of repair in the long afterlife of Atlantic slavery.