Unsettled Maps: Cartography and Afro-Atlantic Religions in Brazil’s Long Eighteenth Century

Cultural Anthropology presents

Matthew Rarey

Unsettled Maps: Cartography and Afro-Atlantic Religions in Brazil's Long Eighteenth Century

Monday, February 24, 2025
1:30pm
Friedl Building, Room 225

In this talk, Matthew Francis Rarey meditates on the consistent, yet largely unexplored, intersections between early modern colonial cartography and the development of Afro-Atlantic religious practices in Brazil's long eighteenth century. Looking to an amulet used in Brazil in 1744; a map of a maroon community from 1763; a Brazilian atlas from 1817; and the longstanding incorporation of Indigenous spirits into Afro-Brazilian spiritual systems; Rarey explores metaphoric framings of Afro-Atlantic religions - and Blackness more broadly - not as diasporic ('off the map' so to speak) but rather as rooted and settled in the Americas.

Matthew Francis Rarey is Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at Oberlin College. A theorist and historian of Black Atlantic visual culture, his book Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke, 2023) garnered multiple prizes, including a 2024 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association and the 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association.