Decolonizing Memory in Bristol

Abstract The toppling of enslaver Edward Colston’s statue in the former slave-trading port city of Bristol by Black Lives Matter protesters in June 2020 was a seismic event that sent shock waves around the world. It was one action of many in a city that has grappled for over thirty years with how to understand, acknowledge, and commemorate in public its history of enslavement. Written from a position of engaged memory activism, this article reflects on the collaborative public memory project Decolonising Memory: Digital Bodies in Movement. Working across academic, community, creative, and digital arts sectors and through an African-centered methodology, the project sought to make a meaningful, new intervention in Bristol’s long and contested public memory of transatlantic enslavement after Colston’s fall. The project centered a radical decolonial praxis by using dance, movement, and creativity as a method for researching different kinds of knowledge about past and present. This article considers two major outputs of this work: a new memorial folk dance and an augmented-reality mobile phone app. It argues that the project was radical in its conception as an African-centered anti-monumental act of counter-memory cocreated “from below” through alternative arts and performance-based memorialization.