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

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.