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  • Assemblage, Occlusion, and the Art of Survival in the Black Atlantic
  • Matthew Francis Rarey (bio)

An archival abscess subtly warps the pages of a manuscript held at the Torre do Tombo National Archive in Lisbon, Portugal (Fig. 1). In 1704, agents of the Portuguese Inquisition sewed this object into the binding of the trial papers of Jacques Viegas, an enslaved "natural of Ouidah" about twenty years old.1 Jacques had entered the Holy Office in June of that year, desperate to confess the sins that burdened him. Reaching into the cuff of his pant leg, he removed this small green fabric pouch and held it up for inquisitors to see.2 It was because of this object, he stated, that demons attacked him, grabbing his limbs as he slept. Over the next four months, inquisitors interrogated Jacques about the object's origins, construction, and use. Jacques explained that he acquired it from Manoel, another black man in Lisbon, who manufactured pouches that could protect their wearers from knife wounds, gunshots, and malevolent forces. Through an opened seam in the side, one can still glimpse the pouch's contents: black hairs, seeds, cotton, and a folded piece of paper (Fig. 2). Manoel always filled his pouches with such empowered substances, later activating their potential through ritual incantations. The secrecy of their manufacture, however, contrasted to the spectacular public performances that confirmed their efficacy. In one case, Manoel put on one of his pouches and plunged a sword into his chest "with great force; but it did not hurt him, only bending the sword."3 This proved to Jacques that it was no ordinary object: It was mandinga. To inquisitors, this term confirmed Jacques's pact with the Devil. And so they sentenced him to an auto-da-fé, a public flogging, and three years of exile to southern Portugal.4 But while Jacques would never return to Lisbon, this object remains there, preserved inside the decaying pages used to imprison it and its owner.

Between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, apotropaic objects called mandingas circulated in places like Madeira, Cape Verde, Brazil, Angola, and Portugal. These diverse regions were bound together by the governance of the Portuguese Empire and the movements of African ideas generated through the transatlantic slave trade, a system of transcultural destructions, flows, and reinventions scholars have come to call the black Atlantic world (Gilroy 1993; Matory 2005). Almost all information about these objects, including the only extant mandingas from this period, survives in the trial records of the Portuguese Inquisition.5 While these documents emerge from Inquisitorial efforts to both suppress and demonize the practice, Inquisitorial records also position mandingas as rich, and heretofore largely unexamined, archives of Africans' experiences in the early modern black Atlantic.

For art historians, mandingas' forms and uses present a series of definitional problems. Strictly speaking, mandinga described not an object's form, but its function. While mandingas commonly protected their owners from violence, some could intervene in sexual and romantic relationships, or even allow enslaved persons to escape the oversight of their masters.6 And while their forms could vary widely, a mandinga was most often a fabric pouch (bolsa) into which empowering substances were placed. Used across all racial and social classes, these bolsas de mandinga were primarily produced and disseminated by enslaved Africans whose biographies crossed central and western Africa, Brazil, and often Portugal; Africans who—like the objects they made and disseminated along the way—spent their lives navigating, fighting, and reinterpreting a range of conflicting, even contradictory, visual and ritual practices.

To date, mandinga pouches have largely eluded scholarly scrutiny. Historians, who have often considered mandingas as symptomatic of colonial power relations (Sansi 2011; Souza 2003; Sweet 2003) or African resistance to slavery (Harding 2003), tend to characterize their contents as difficult-to-interpret transculturations or as efforts to mask or dialogue indigenous African beliefs with foreign influences (Lahon 2004; Calainho 2008; Santos 2008). Meanwhile, Amy J. Buono notes that art historians [End Page 20] "have largely ignored the mandinga pouches, in which the more 'artistic' elements are hidden from view inside the pouch itself" (2015: 25-26). Both of these perspectives parallel mandingas reception...

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