Breaking the Dead Silence: Engaging with the Legacies of Empire and Slave-Ownership in Bath and Bristol’s Memoryscapes

An Open Access edition is available.

The murder of George Floyd in 2020, the renewed international take up of the cry Black Lives Matter and the subsequent toppling of a statue commemorating slave-merchant-turned-philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol provoked urgent questions on memorialisation, white privilege, social justice and repair. Debates on how legacies of colonialism and empire in Britain should be addressed spilled out of the scholarly world into the public discourse. In the immediate wake of the statue toppling this book offers a unique, distinctive and timely contribution to those debates: a series of voices and experiences are offered as critical commentaries and accounts of recent interventions on an official heritage narrative. It sets out to break the ’dead silence’, by bringing together diverse perspectives from academics, artists, activists, heritage professionals and tourist guides. The book offers fresh insights, referencing work attending to the impacts and legacies of colonisation primarily in Bath and Bristol, augmented with comparative contributions from Lancaster and Mexico offering significant and pertinent resonances. A range of strategies are explored towards enabling silenced voices to be heard and engage in conversations about how the past is represented, including Co-Creation, new agonistic museum practices, innovative creative and somatic approaches.

Dr Christina Horvath is a Reader in French Politics at the University of Bath. Her research engages with agonistic approaches to the legacies of the transatlantic slavery in Western Europe and the Caribbean and to the memory of disputed territories in Europe and Asia. She has led several international projects in this field. Her most recent research focuses on decolonising heritage narratives about gardens, green spaces and botany.

Dr Richard S. White is an independent artist-researcher. His institutional affiliation is as Senior Lecturer in Media Practice in the School of Art Film and Media at Bath Spa University.