Insignificant Things

Insignificant Things centers on bolsas de mandingas—small leather pouches containing items of heterogeneous cultural and religious origins, made and sold by enslaved Africans in the Portuguese empire, and believed to possess apotropaic powers. Matthew Rarey explores how these modest portable objects embodied modes of resistance and survival in a world marked by imperial expansion, colonial repression, and enslavement. The titular phrase “insignificant things” is drawn from the trial record describing the contents of the leather pouches of Lobão, a free Nagô man suspected of involvement in the 1835 Malê Revolt and arrested by the police in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Ironically, in the way it is repeatedly used throughout this book, this expression encapsulates the sophisticated visual strategies deployed by enslaved and free Africans in the sixteenth-nineteenth century Atlantic world. Rarey highlights the tension between the ways these amulets are described in Inquisition records as “insignificant” and the recurring confiscation of these objects by inquisitors, which betrays a suspicion of, if not belief in, their efficacy.Rarey defends a complex and nuanced argument throughout this book: the “seeming indecipherability and visual banality of bolsas” constitute “their core aesthetic strategies” (p. 22). He considers mandingas in the context of the production and circulation of comparable talismanic objects in the Upper Guinea and Sahel and proposes several interpretations of the meaning, function, and efficacy of mandingas for their users, focusing on enslaved African men who were caught and tried by Inquisitors for possessing or selling them. Without pretending to reach a definitive interpretation of the contents and meanings of these amulets which were designed to elude comprehension, Rarey offers new ways of framing these objects within the context of an evolving Black Atlantic culture and reflects on how they may give us a glimpse into their users’ diasporic experiences and radical political vision. By so doing, he tackles the methodological challenge posed by mandingas to the ocularcentric discipline of art history: how to study objects that were designed to evade scrutiny. Rarey's method consists in treating mandingas not as simple material objects but as “a popular discourse” (p. 16). Indeed, as products of the hostile and unstable world which their makers and users had to navigate, mandingas are the materialized strategies deployed by displaced Africans seeking to protect themselves from interpersonal violence and capture.This is Rarey's first monograph; his research focuses on the material culture of Afro-descendants in West Africa, Brazil, and Portugal from the seventeenth century to the present day. Prior to the publication of this book, Rarey was known in the field of art history for his analyses of nineteenth-century European representations of Black people and, more recently, his study of Black cartography in late colonial Brazil. Rarey presented part of chapter 2 of the present book in an article published in African Arts (Rarey 2018), as well as a condensed version of chapter 3 in a volume edited by Huey Copeland and Steven Nelson (Rarey 2023). The scholarly achievements of this book have been recognized by the 2024 Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association, the 2024 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and the 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association.While Rarey developed his research on mandingas at the same time as and in conversation with Cécile Fromont, her analysis (Fromont 2020) differs in its focus: Rarey examines these pouches through the framework of occlusion and survival, while Fromont highlights the mutually transformative exchanges between African and European visual and religious practices in the early modern period. Choosing various African and European artifacts—most of which differ from those found in Rarey's book—to enhance her study of mandingas, Fromont insists on the need for a culturally and historically specific discussion of these amulets’ sources, processes, and effects. She thus calls for a more historical approach to African art that emphasizes the continent's dynamic interactions with the wider world and understands its canonical artifacts not as isolated works but as direct products of the Atlantic slave trade. While the two scholars’ interpretations and approaches do not differ substantially, Rarey's book—to my knowledge, the first in the English language dedicated to mandingas—presents a more expansive investigation into the various facets of these amuletic pouches.The four chronologically organized chapters of this book each explores a different aspect of these pouches. Throughout the book, Rarey recounts specific cases of Black men arrested for selling or possessing mandingas based on their Inquisition trial records, such as the story of José Francisco Pereira and Jacques Viegas. To reconstruct the history of these elusive objects, Rarey examines a wide range of primary sources, from the Portuguese Inquisition trial transcripts to nineteenth century Brazilian police record. Moreover, he analyzes an impressive range of objects from Africa and its diaspora— from bocio figures to the contemporary work of Haitian artist Pierrot Barra—to enhance his richly illustrated discussion of mandingas.The first chapter (“Labels”) traces the origin of the ethnonym mandinga and the emergence of amuletic pouches in the Sahel in the fourteenth-seventeenth centuries. While the term “Mandinka” was used to designate inhabitants of the Mali Empire since the thirteenth century, an increasing number of people strategically adopted it as a marker of identity during the boom of the Sahel gold trade as it became associated with social and economic prestige. In sixteenth-seventeenth century Upper Guinea, amuletic pouches filled with Qur'anic papers and selectively appropriated Christian symbols emerged as “material embodiments of interreligious currency and agents of cross-cultural translation” (p. 36). These early versions of mandingas already showcased their makers’ skillful use of symbols to address various religious sensibilities. Throughout this chapter, Rarey interweaves analyses of African sculptures that feature amulets in order to support his interpretation of mandinga pouches with the help of more traditional objects of art history. The chapter ends with a reflection on a current problem in the methodology of art history: the tendency to classify African and other non-Western objects according to ethnic labels. This categorizing impulse is, as Rarey shows, inextricably connected to the legacy of colonialism and the classification of objects and people as its primary mechanism of control. These often imprecise, if not inaccurate, ethnic monikers used by enslavers to objectify and stereotype human subjects became, paradoxically, tools for building solidarity networks among Africans in the New World.Chapter 2 (“Contents”) further elaborates how mandingas challenge us to think outside of the classificatory systems and religious and cultural boundaries that are widely used in Eurocentric intellectual traditions. By looking at the heterogeneous contents of mandinga pouches— which included pieces of Catholic altar stone, papers inscribed with prayers, bones, feathers, rocks, sticks, hair, and human bones, to name but a few—Rarey argues that Africans were key, albeit historically overlooked, actors in the expanding circulation of material goods in the Atlantic world. Noting how individual contents of mandingas have a synecdochic and indexical relationship with the external world, he affirms that the careful selection of these seemingly insignificant pieces demonstrates the range and depth of African healers’ knowledge systems. But Rarey takes his interpretation a step further, as he often does throughout this book, suggesting that one might look at mandingas not only as “an index of their world, not as an effort to control it, but as a model for imagining it anew” (p. 75).In chapter 3 (“Markings”), which contains some of the most interesting and engaging passages of this book, Rarey turns to the written components of mandinga pouches to show how their makers mobilized the power of the written word “to consciously respond to the connections between archival production and corporeal violence” (p. 124), using Hortense Spillers's critical framework. The parallels between written marks on pieces of paper and other forms of marking on the bodies of enslaved people are indeed hard to miss. Mandinga-makers, in their choice of inscriptions to be included in their pouches, sought to subvert the repressive effects of written words authored by Portuguese authorities. Through a close reading of handwritten papers inside bolsas de mandingas—including drawings, orations, and excerpts from official decrees—this chapter explores how their users manipulated the mutable relations among bodies, papers, and texts. Rarey effectively illustrates the real-life consequences of various textual materials that circulated in the eighteenth century Portuguese empire by looking at Inquisitorial editais (decrees), cartas de tocar (cards for touching) used by enslaved men to gain control of other people's bodies, manumission letters, and pontos riscados (ritual diagrams drawn by Afro-descendants in the New World). However, the author's interpretation of unusual spellings in a prayer found inside a mandinga sold by José Francisco Pereira as “inventive” (p. 139) in their polysemy is contestable, as interesting as it is in theory. More than a strategy for evoking multiple meanings through the ambiguous spellings of words, this might simply be a case of misspelling due to the limited education of the writer—most likely a servant at a local church named António Guedes who was hired by José Francisco to transcribe prayers to be used in his mandingas.The final chapter (“Revolts”) addresses how leather pouches containing Islamic prayers came to be seen as evidence of conspiracy among the enslaved in Brazil at the turn of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the use of such pouches by participants in the 1835 Malê Revolt in Salvador da Bahia, Rarey reflects on how these seemingly harmless objects became associated with violence and rebellion as an increasing number of Africans used talismans to defy systems of surveillance. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff's (2011) scholarship on slavery's reliance on methods of visual control, Rarey asserts that visually discreet objects such as patuás (leather pouches containing Arabic inscriptions) challenged the imperial authority's totalizing vision and performance of surveillance through the perplexity they generated among the police and judges. This chapter also contains a rare and interesting discussion of balangandãs as a counterpoint to patuás in their gendered practice, aesthetic features, and mode of political resistance. Worn by enslaved Black women in Bahia, these amuletic objects were both visually and aurally conspicuous, thus avoiding the suspicion of onlookers by being so blatantly exposed for all to see.Insignificant Things updates and renews scholarly interest in mandingas, primarily drawing on Brazilian scholarship on these objects. It presents original ways of approaching a challenging and elusive object of study for art history by looking at related objects, critically reading archival records, and leaning on theories of Black and critical archive studies. In fact, one of the most remarkable aspects of this book is the author's deft integration and discussion of previous scholarship to frame his discussion of amuletic objects and strengthen his argument. By treating archival silences as “the object of, rather than an obstacle to, a project of archival recovery” (p. 169), this book is a timely and valuable contribution to the ongoing scholarly debates on ethical forms of engagement with colonial and imperial archives. This monograph is accessible for advanced undergraduates and graduate students and will be most rewarding for scholars interested in the Black Atlantic and critical archival studies. I strongly recommend including this book in the syllabuses of graduate seminars in African, Afro-diasporic, and Latin American art and history, as well as methodology classes in art history.The author's final hope for this book, as stated in the epilogue, is to inspire future researchers to continue the study of mandingas and their counterparts in a creative and ethical way. The publication succeeds in this aim, as it is proof that an ethical study of “insignificant” objects made by the enslaved is possible through attentive observation and sustained engagement with diverse scholarly and archival materials. Rarey's ethical stance is also reflected in his moving dedication of this book to mandinga makers and users and “To all those who sought protection in their time of need, and to all those who still seek it.” Thus, in addition to its scholarly achievements, this book is also a powerful reminder of the ongoing struggles of displaced and marginalized people who desperately long for a safer place in this world

Argument (complex analysis) · Colonialism · Confiscation · Context (archaeology) · Embodied cognition · Interpretation (philosophy) · Portuguese · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History of Colonial Brazil

• Assemblage, Occlusion, and the Art of Survival in the Black Atlantic

  Matthew Francis Rarey•African Arts•2018

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• Paper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition

  Open Access•Cécile Fromont•Journal of the American Academy…•2020

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