Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic

In Insignificant Things, Matthew Francis Rarey explores the history of African-associated amulets, known as "mandingas," used by enslaved and marginalized people in the Black Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. These amulet pouches, containing various objects, served as portable archives of their experiences of enslavement and displacement. Rarey argues that mandingas are critical to understanding Black Atlantic art history and reveals how they were created to protect Black life from the erasure efforts of transatlantic slavery.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 09 June 2023
Publisher: Duke University Press

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Matthew Francis Rarey explores the history of African-related amulets that enslaved and other oppressed people used as survival tools in the Black Atlantic world. These amulet pouches, also known as "mandingas," were widely used throughout Africa, Brazil, and Portugal and contained a variety of items, including herbs, Islamic prayers, shells, and coins. Rarey demonstrates how mandingas served as portable archives of their creators' experiences of enslavement, displacement, and diaspora by 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. 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 intended to erase Black life, for objects like mandingas that were created to protect it.

Weight: 452g
Dimension: 228 x 151 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478019855