The Fluid Lives of Objects: Diasporas of Black Sacred Material Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

Since at least the turn of the eighteenth century, wide-ranging but ultimately linked moralizing institutions such as the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions; European colonial missions; nationalized police forces; imperialist military occupations; and zealous ethnographers have confiscated, classified, and criminalized the sacred materials of Black spiritual practices. Through descriptive emphasis and analytical precision, and by sublimating the thefts which birthed the study of Afro-Atlantic spiritual and material culture, the writings emerging from these institutions collectively managed to create the idea of distinct material objects worthy of art historical study. This move effectively divorced the sacred objects of Black religiosities from their communal-spiritual roles, while simultaneously framing the “object” as the intellectual property of the institution. Today, museums and archives across the Atlantic world inherit and grapple with this legacy.

The papers on this panel take this history as a productive starting point. Thinking at the intersection of the institutional histories of magic, material collections, and Afro-Atlantic spiritualities (broadly defined), panelists will propose novel interpretations, as well ethical and scholarly frameworks, for thinking with the material culture of Black religiosities recontextualized in museums and archives. How might we interpret such objects in ways that foreground the multiple, accumulated histories that such objects acquire as they move into new spaces and contexts? What do such histories of diasporic object movement reveal about the Atlantic dimensions and mutual entanglements of Black spiritual practices and colonizing regimes? And what new forms of collaboration, restitution, and knowledge-creation might emerge from this nexus?

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Matthew Rarey, Oberlin College

Individual Presentations

• The Devil’s ‘Advocate’: Black Women’s Domestic Devotions in the Early Spanish Atlantic - Nathalie Miraval, Yale University

• Tabot & Ketab: Trajectories and Dilemmas of Ethiopian-Eritrean sacred artefacts - Helina Gebremedhen, New York University

• Instruments of Empire?: Abakuá Ritual Objects and Spanish Imperial Desire at the End of the Nineteenth Century - Sophia Kitlinski, University of Kentucky

• ‘Syncretism’ as History: Afro-Brazilian Shrines in British Ethnographic Museums - Luisa Karman, SOAS University of London