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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.
This forward-thinking collection brings together over sixty essays that invoke images to summon, interpret, and argue with visual studies and its neighboring fields such as art history, media studies, visual anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, and aesthetics. The product of a multi-year collaboration between graduate students from around the world, spearheaded by James Elkins, this one-of-a-kind anthology is a truly international, interdisciplinary point of entry into cutting-edge visual studies research. The book is fluid in relation to disciplines; it is frequently inventive in relation to guiding theories; it is unpredictable in its allegiance and interest in the past of the discipline--reflecting the ongoing growth of visual studies.
This book explores the history of African tangible and intangible heritages and its links with the public memory of slavery in Brazil and Angola. The two countries are deeply connected, given how most enslaved Africans, forcibly brought to Brazil during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, were from West Central Africa. Brazil imported the largest number of enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade and was the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888. Today, other than Nigeria, the largest population of African descent is in Brazil. Yet it was only in the last twenty years that Brazil's African heritage and its slave past have gained greater visibility. Prior...
A thematic presentation of the groundbreaking and provocative art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, this volume offers a new appreciation of his tragic but highly influential career. Exquisitely reproduced full-page color illustrations of his paintings cover the full thematic range of Basquiat's work. Author Dieter Buchhart explores how Basquiat's success paved the way for an entire generation of black artists and how street culture has spread into popular culture. Texts by curators, art dealers, and cultural critics discuss the significance of Basquiat's oeuvre and show how his approach and subject matter continue to influence artists around the world.
After the Brazilian military took power in a coup in 1964, many artists tried to distance themselves from politics; others went into exile. This book covers the most culturally repressive years of the regime, from 1968-74 and looks at artists who found their own visual language of resistance, outside government-controlled cultural centers or the militant left.
This book is a transnational and comparative study examining the processes that led to the memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the second half of the twentieth century. Araujo explores numerous kinds of initiatives such as monuments, memorials, and museums as well as heritage sites. By connecting different projects developed in various countries and urban centers in Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the last two decades, the author retraces the various stages of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery including the enslavement in Africa, the process of confinement in slave depots, the Middle Passage, the arrival in the Americas, the daily life of forced labor, until...
Illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic world By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events. In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings o...
Note: this is an abridged version of the book with references removed. The complete edition is also available online. This book explores the history of African tangible and intangible heritages and its links with the public memory of slavery in Brazil and Angola. The two countries are deeply connected, given how most enslaved Africans, forcibly brought to Brazil during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, were from West Central Africa. Brazil imported the largest number of enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade and was the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888. Today, other than Nigeria, the largest population of African descent is in Brazil. Yet it was...
An exploration of how Afro-Mexicans affirmed their culture, subjectivities and colonial condition through festive culture and performance.
Through meticulous research, interviews, and documentation, Gullah Geechee Muslims in America: Exploring Islamic Identity in the African Diaspora presents a unique and significant contribution to religious studies, Africana studies, and anthropology by shedding light on a previously understudied aspect of the Gullah/Geechee community and culture. Previous studies of enslaved African Muslims have claimed that Islam, as a conscious practice, vanished by the eve of the Civil War. However, Muhammad Fraser-Rahim highlights the continuity of Islamic belief and practice in the Lowcountry. For scholars who have spent decades researching the retention of African culture among the enslaved and their descendants, this book reveals certain challenges and poses new avenues of research.