The 2024 Annual DSR Alumni & Friends Lecture
When and Where
Speakers
Description
"Slave Trade, Witchcraft, Art: Material and Spiritual Histories of the Afro-Atlantic"
The 2024 Annual DSR Alumni & Friends Lecture
Lecture and Q&A: 4:00-5:30 pm • Light refreshments 5:30-6:30 pm
Presented by the Department for the Study of Religion in collaboration with U of T’s Department of Art History, the Centre for Diaspora and Transatlantic Studies and the African Studies Centre
IN-PERSON REGISTRATION HAS REACHED CAPACITY AND THE WAITLIST IS CLOSED.
VIRTUAL ATTENDANCE ON ZOOM IS AVAILABLE. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT WILL NOT BE RECORDED.
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 the guest speaker
Cécile Fromont is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, and Faculty Director of the Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. 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.
