Decolonizing Memory in Bristol
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4053090 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jessica Moody (0000-0003-3089-2559) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 2025 |
| Issue | 152 |
| Pages | 91-110 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Radical History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-6545 • E-ISSN: 1534-1453 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/01636545-11609968 |
| OpenAlex | W4410812887 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 27 |
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
Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
Frames of Remembrance
The persistence of memory
Memory Activism
Memory, History, Forgetting
Submerged Narratives
Mourning in Reluctant Sites of Memory
Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration
The British Slave Trade and Public Memory
Nationalism Reframed
Decolonising human exhibits
Being alongside
Slavery and Bristol's ‘golden age’
Sites of imperial memory
Creating memorials, building identities
Chords of Freedom’
After the fall, where
Sedimented Histories
Between Memory and History
Queer Monuments
Theorizing from the Borders
The Counter-Monument
Delinking
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |