Go to → Cécile Fromont

Paper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition: Tracing Power in the Early Modern Portuguese-Speaking Atlantic World Cécile Fromont, Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at Yale University In 1730, the Inquisition of Lisbon arrested José Francisco, an enslaved man raised in West Africa, who had learned in Brazil the art and craft of making amulets known as bolsas de mandinga. In their composition, use, and afterlives in the Inquisition the bolsas reveal the deep and mutually transformative spiritual and material connections that the slave trade engendered between Europeans and Africans in the early modern Atlantic World. Created and used in parallel to similar objects made elsewhere on the continent, once deemed fetishes and now considered central to the canon of African art, they waged a spirited battle against the witchcraft of the slave trade.