!!CANCELLED!! The 2024 Annual DSR Alumni & Friends Lecture
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Notice - February 27, 2024: THIS EVENT IS CANCELLED
With apologies for the late notice, we are very sorry to announce that due to illness our guest speaker is unable to deliver the lecture “Slave Trade, Witchcraft, Art: Material and Spiritual Histories of the Afro-Atlantic,” which was scheduled to take place on Wednesday, February 28.
We plan to reschedule this event for Fall 2024 and will post details when the arrangements have been finalized. In the meantime, we wish Professor Fromont the very best for a swift recovery.
We thank all those who registered to attend for your interest in participating and regret any inconvenience this postponement may cause.
"Slave Trade, Witchcraft, Art: Material and Spiritual Histories of the Afro-Atlantic"
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Inquisition of Lisbon and the civil authorities of Saint Domingue each arrested and detained an African amulet maker. At the center of the two affairs were the empowered bundles the two men composed, turning mostly European esoteric material into empowered objects of Afro-Atlantic agency in the hopes to gain control over their lived circumstances.
This lecture considers how these empowered objects bear witness in their composition, use, and afterlives in the archives to the multivalent connections that the slave trade engendered between Europeans and Africans along the two continents’ coasts, and beyond, in the Americas. They enjoin us to think anew about the spiritual and material histories of the Atlantic world as shared domains between Europeans and Africans, and to consider the entangled trajectories of slave trade, witchcraft, and art.
About
Cécile Fromont is a professor in the history of art department at Yale University. Her writing and teaching focus on the visual, material, and religious culture of Africa and Latin America with a special emphasis on the early modern period (ca 1500-1800), on the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic World, and on the slave trade.
Queries
If you have any questions about this event, please email religion.comms@utoronto.ca.
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