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.

Abyssal geographies: an ethnographic reply. A commentary on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’.

“…The plantation's memory and material consequences persist. In fact, enslavement remains very much un‐mourned throughout the Atlantic world(Philogene Heron, 2022). And more specifically, the abyss (kidnappings, forced crossings, the slave trade winds, the hold, the dispossessions) is integral to the work of Glissant, Benítez‐Rojo and Brathwaite.…”

Excavating Racial Capitalism in London's West India Docks

“…Part of what is at stake in my argument, then, is a re‐engagement with how we read the built environment – specifically, a desire to untangle those vernaculars that move “uninterruptedly”, in Frantz Fanon's (2001:39) phrase, “from the banks of the colonial territory to the palaces and docks of the mother country”. As Adom Philogene Heron (2022) has demonstrated, such entanglements are often at their most vivid in creative responses to Britain's imperial geography. The contemporary British artist Hew Locke has yet to target Milligan's statue as part of his “Natives and Colonials” (2005–present) project, but his method for confronting the public display of London's colonial history is certainly instructive.…”

“…As Richard Drayton (2020:15) has argued, “Locke's works should thus be read as palimpsests, where multiple truths and perspectives, located in distinct historical moments, are made to collide and coincide”. Important scholarship has started to add the agency of enslaved voices to our understanding of the Caribbean (Brown 2008), but work still needs to be done in extracting – like Locke – the alternative truths contained within slavery's official documents (Heron 2022). The clinical removal of Milligan's statue has stymied this possibility in the Docklands, but in what follows I intend to treat my sources as palimpsests, returning to the archives of Britain's West India interest to read its texts against their grain.…”

World-making, desire, and the future

“…Outlining the atmospheric affect of capitalism, Sutherland writes how ‘affective resistances of capitalism might be in suspension; denoting both a sense of stalling (of something interrupted but with a possibility of future movement) and something ‘hanging in the air’, something not yet grounded’. Here, I see resonance in how haunting, as a temporal and spatial method with genealogies in Black and Indigenous studies, attends to the specters of colonialism, and how haunting too is a form of stalling, of refusal to let colonial histories be buried (Best and Ramírez, 2021; Gordon, 2008; Heron, 2022; McKittrick, 2013; Roberts, 2020). Haunting is a spatially ephemeral form of ‘remembering and reminding’ (Tuck and Ree, 2013: 642) that refuses the colonial-capitalist (death-making) order, operationalized by particular Black and Indigenous art forms.…”