Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic(The Visual Arts of Africa and Its Diasporas)

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix Introduction. Significance, Survival, and Silence  1 1. Labels  31 2. Contents  72 3. Markings  124 4. Revolts  171 Epilogue  208 Notes  217 Works Cited  249 Index  275

About the Author :
Matthew Francis Rarey is Associate Professor of Art History at Oberlin College.

Review :
"In short, Rarey has produced an important contribution to the discussion of the religious life of Africans at home and in the Diaspora. It is a book full of insights into both the religious culture of the Inquisition as well as that of the makers and users of the bolsas. Rarey’s attention to detail and the force of his reasoning about it is sure to be a starting point for further investigations." - John K. Thornton (International Journal of African Historical Studies) "Rarey’s examination of his evidence is fascinating, his writing, eloquent and complex. . . . Altogether, Rarey’s book builds on remarkable archival work in Portugal, Brazil, and the United States, enhancing our understanding of the ways in which enslaved Africans attempted to attenuate the effects of slavery and gain renown for their control of forces and materials eagerly sought by wider segments of society." - Rosa de Jorio (Africa Today) "Rarey has written a study of amulet making that reads as a history of human flourishing and an archive of aspirations for emancipation under some of history’s most crushing circumstances. It will no doubt inspire scholars for years to come." - Joseph Hellweg (Africa Today) ". . . Insignificant Things is an important contribution to the history of the Black Atlantic world. Its refined take on mobile and ephemeral materiality will also be of great interest to non-Atlantic specialists. Those working on objects in transcultural settings will find the author’s deep reflexivity on the history and the politics of object labels to be particularly useful. More generally, one of the greatest qualities of the book is the multi-layered reflection on archives it offers." - Ana Struillou (Journal of Early Modern History) "Rarey’s book is a valuable addition to the historiography of apotropaic objects in the Black Atlantic world. . . . Rarey convincingly reads into the silences of the archives and finds ways to evoke the voices of the subaltern Atlantic world, resulting in an impeccably sourced volume that offers deep analysis of emic and etic interpretations of bolsas de mandinga." - Susan L. Kwosek (African Studies Review) "This book is a major contribution to not only African and African diaspora studies but also to the visual history of global subaltern and slave studies. . . . I really admire Rarey’s brilliant reading and interpretation of subaltern sources in the Portuguese colonial archives." - Hermann W. von Hesse (Journal of African History) "Commodification and methods of disrupting it are pivotal to the study of the Black Atlantic. Insignificant Things makes a significant contribution to understanding the unique place of vernacular art and African diasporic material culture. . . . Rarey has authored a materially grounded and discursively rich intellectual and art history that centres African responses to the slow apocalypse of Atlantic slavery." - Lila O'Leary Chambers (International Journal of Maritime History)