ODSECS 42: Matt Rarey

Title: Objecting (to) the Fetish: Debating African Art History in Lisbon, 1731

Abstract: Since its deployment in the context of Europeans’ and Africans’ disagreements over the value of objects and lives in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century West Africa, the discourse “fetishism” has played a critical role in delimiting the material and conceptual contours of “African” art history. But, in response to a dearth of scholarship regarding Africans’ opinions on the material culture of the eighteenth-century Atlantic, this talk asks how Africans’ responses to Europeans’ accusations of fetishism re-map the concept’s entanglements with art history’s early development in eighteenth-century Europe. My sources are the testimonies of José Francisco Pereira and José Francisco Pedroso, two enslaved men born in present-day Benin, who appeared on trial before the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon in the summer of 1731. The pair was accused of feitiçaria (translated here as “fetishism” or “sorcery”) stemming from their manufacture of African-associated apotropaic objects and amulets for physical protection. And they objected to or explained away the accusation by re-classifying the objects using terms like “Mandinga” and “Relic Pouch.” I suggest the accused did not deploy these names as a kind of corrective to Europeans’ mislabeling, but rather to interrogate Inquisitors’ conceptions of their objects’ genealogies and valuations. If we are to understand, in Delinda Collier’s words, art history’s early formation as a “pidgin language in the theater of conquest,” what might Pereira and Pedroso have been saying to their European interrogators by defining their objects in this way? And given that these debates over objects took place in the Portuguese Inquisition, how might these terms impact our historical framing of not only African art history’s institutional origins, but its concomitant racializing mechanisms?

Bio: Matt Rarey researches and teach the art history of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on connections between West Africa, Brazil, and Portugal from the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries. These interests coalesce in his book, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023). The book traces the accumulative history of bolsas de mandinga: pouch-form amulets of transcultural origins that took on new forms and histories as Africans purveyed them in the south Atlantic between 1660 and 1835. Insignificant Things garnered multiple major prizes, including a 2024 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), and the 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. He is now at work on a second book project about maps of maroon communities and Black diasporic landscapes in South America and the Caribbean, and the afterlives of these maps in the work of contemporary Black artists and land rights activists.