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In Insignificant Things Matthew Francis Rarey traces the history of
the African-associated amulets that enslaved and other marginalized
people carried as tools of survival in the Black Atlantic world
from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Often considered
visually benign by white Europeans, these amulet pouches, commonly
known as “mandingas,” were used across Africa, Brazil, and
Portugal and contained myriad objects, from herbs and Islamic
prayers to shells and coins. Drawing on Arabic-language narratives
from the West African Sahel, the archives of the Portuguese
Inquisition, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travel and
merchant accounts of the West African Coast, and early
nineteenth-century Brazilian police records, Rarey shows how
mandingas functioned as portable archives of their makers’
experiences of enslavement, displacement, and diaspora. He presents
them as examples of the visual culture of enslavement and critical
to conceptualizing Black Atlantic art history. Ultimately, Rarey
looks to the archives of transatlantic slavery, which were meant to
erase Black life, for objects like the mandingas that were created
to protect it.
In Insignificant Things Matthew Francis Rarey traces the history of
the African-associated amulets that enslaved and other marginalized
people carried as tools of survival in the Black Atlantic world
from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Often considered
visually benign by white Europeans, these amulet pouches, commonly
known as “mandingas,” were used across Africa, Brazil, and
Portugal and contained myriad objects, from herbs and Islamic
prayers to shells and coins. Drawing on Arabic-language narratives
from the West African Sahel, the archives of the Portuguese
Inquisition, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travel and
merchant accounts of the West African Coast, and early
nineteenth-century Brazilian police records, Rarey shows how
mandingas functioned as portable archives of their makers’
experiences of enslavement, displacement, and diaspora. He presents
them as examples of the visual culture of enslavement and critical
to conceptualizing Black Atlantic art history. Ultimately, Rarey
looks to the archives of transatlantic slavery, which were meant to
erase Black life, for objects like the mandingas that were created
to protect it.
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