Transcending the Atlantic

Rarey was inspired to write Insignificant Things after learning about amulet pouches, which were owned by enslaved Africans. Through his studies, he found that the pouches held great significance to the people who created and owned them, and they revealed a long tradition of complex value and meaning in cultural and political movements within the African continent. These pouches often contained prayers and treasured items and were carried with the faith that they would bring protection and good fortune to those who possessed them. 

The amulet pouch practice continued for centuries, and can be found across various cultures. However, the iteration associated with the African diaspora in 17th- and 18th- century Brazil intrigued Rarey as a scholarly mystery: After seeing a cursory reference to these pouches in a book during graduate school, he asked his professor about the artifacts and learned that very little research had been conducted on them. 

“I thought it was such an important methodological question,” he says. “If we have this group of objects that we know are so widely used by enslaved people and seem to be so central to their lives, we want to forward a kind of art history that actually centers the lived experiences of people that we don’t normally write about.”

Rarey’s research process included learning Brazilian Portuguese so he could read original documents archived in Lisbon, Portugal, with insights into the people who made the amulets. However, the materials were written in 18th-century Portuguese, and it took “months and months of obsessing over these pages” to decipher their meaning, he says.

Uncovering the story behind these artifacts was also made challenging by the fact that only two amulet pouches still exist today. According to Rarey, those pouches survived because they were confiscated by the Portuguese Inquisition in the 18th century and preserved for recordkeeping. Although there were hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in Brazil at the time, the vast majority of the remaining pouches fell by the wayside, either disposed of or never found by the Inquisition. 

For Rarey, that led to an important question: “What does it mean that our access to learning about these objects is mediated through the very institutional structures that were meant to destroy or suppress them?” he asks. “There were probably millions in the world, and they just disappeared with history.”

After all, enslaved people were “critically analyzing and reinterpreting” their life events, he adds, and the production of the pouches shows they were “moving through and commenting on [those events] through the objects.” Art history is also “uniquely positioned to interpret some of the only material objects that are the evidence of [a] person’s life,” Rarey stresses, and can challenge common misconceptions to foster a more thorough education about humanity.

This is especially true for enslaved people or other subjugated groups because there are often few or no surviving written records that detail their experiences. “Sometimes slavery is spoken about as a generic condition, … and it’s such a widely diverse practice and situation that there are as many responses to it,” Rarey says. “When we deal with these microhistories, our assumptions really get abandoned.”   

Rarey emphasizes how multicultural and interwoven world history truly is. “I see Africa written about sometimes as unchanging space, and I really want to push against that,” he says. “Sometimes we use the word ‘Western’ to mean ‘white,’ even though we don’t want to say that. So whenever I hear that word [‘Western’] deployed, … it erases what is a very long and deep history of persons of color in Europe.”

To Rarey, understanding art is understanding what makes us uniquely human, and it adds vibrance to the stories of people who created it. “We can read the textual records, and there’s not much in them,” he says. “But if we have the critical analyses to interpret the material objects, … then we open up radically new voices and experiences and perspectives that aren’t otherwise available.”

Matthew Rarey’s research focuses on the art history of the Black Atlantic with a focus on connections between West Africa, Brazil, and Portugal from the 17th through the 21st centuries. He earned a PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic won the 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award.

About the Image

José Francisco Pereira (attributed)

Paper with figures, dated 1730.

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