Seminar 41
Tita Chico, Patricia Martins Marcos, and Allison Gibeily
15 April 2025 16.00 GMT/11.00 EST
Tita Chico is Professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of, most recently, On Wonder. She is currently Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, where she is collaborating with Professor Elaine McGirr.
Allison Gibeily (pronounced ji-BAY-lee) is a PhD candidate in English and a Mellon cluster fellow in Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University. She studies embodied and oral literary practices in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Arabic travel writing. Her research has been funded through several national and international fellowships, including the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Amman, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Gotha Research Center in Germany, the Modern Language Association, and the American Research Institute in Turkey. Her article on Indigenous Guanche knowledge production in the 17th-century Canary Islands was recently published in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.
Patrícia Martins Marcos is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. She is currently working on two book projects. Imperial Whiteness: Race, Patriarchy, and the Sciences of Human Improvement in the South Atlantic (1550-1850) documents and recovers the specific meaning of the Iberian concept of “race” (raça/raza), as it was used and recurrently rendered operable in Portugal and its Atlantic colonies. A History of Blood: From Genesis to Genomics, offers a detailed inquiry into the many meanings, both material and metaphoric, of blood in Europe and the Americas. Marcos has published in A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking in the Age of Empire, (1700-1900), Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past, Radical History Review, and Isis: Journal for the History of Science.
Performances of Wonder; Geographies of Knowledge
The long eighteenth-century textual landscape is populated by wonders and by wondering: one encounters seemingly countless objects of wonder and just as many experiences of wonder. Many of these texts take up wonder as a noun and a verb, as an object and feeling, as an experience both emotional and intellectual. They also imagine wonder in relation to emergent scientific and medical practices.
“Performances of Wonder, Geographies of Knowledge” brings together three scholars to discuss the epistemological and methodological implications of wonder for eighteenth-century studies:
• Patrícia Martins Marcos on Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira’s Philosophical Travels (1782-1793) as a classificatory exercise
• Allison Gibeily on Riḥlat al-Shammās Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb ilā baldat Istanbūl (The travels of Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb to the city of Istanbul, 1764-1765) and improvisation in Arabic literature
• Tita Chico on colonial entomology and the slave ship icon in Hope Pearl Strickland’s film short, “I’LL BE BACK!” (2022)
Reflecting our shared intellectual commitments and grounding our roundtable conversation, each of us will begin by meditating upon the following passage about wonder from Katherine McKittrick, which we invite audience members to contemplate with us:
This is a way of living, and an analytical frame, that is curious and sustained by wonder (the desire to know). This is a method that demands openness and is unsatisfied with questions that result in descriptive- data-induced answers. Black studies and anticolonial thought offer methodological practices wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices and pursue ways of living the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized. The method is rigorous, too. Wonder is study. Curiosity is attentive. Black method is therefore not continuously and absolutely undisciplined (invariably without precision, invariably undone). Black method is precise, detailed, coded, long, and forever. The practice of bringing together multiple texts, stories, songs, and places involves the difficult work of thinking and learning across many sites, and thus coming to know, generously, varying and shifting worlds and ideas.
--Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2021), p. 5.
Seminar 42
Matt Rarey
14 May 2025 / 16.00 BST
Matt Rarey researches and teach the art history of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on connections between West Africa, Brazil, and Portugal from the seventeenth through twenty-first centuries. These interests coalesce in his book, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023). The book traces the accumulative history of bolsas de mandinga: pouch-form amulets of transcultural origins that took on new forms and histories as Africans purveyed them in the south Atlantic between 1660 and 1835. Insignificant Things garnered multiple major prizes, including a 2024 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), and the 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. He is now at work on a second book project about maps of maroon communities and Black diasporic landscapes in South America and the Caribbean, and the afterlives of these maps in the work of contemporary Black artists and land rights activists.
Objecting (to) the Fetish: Debating African Art History in Lisbon, 1731
Since its deployment in the context of Europeans’ and Africans’ disagreements over the value of objects and lives in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century West Africa, the discourse “fetishism” has played a critical role in delimiting the material and conceptual contours of “African” art history. But, in response to a dearth of scholarship regarding Africans’ opinions on the material culture of the eighteenth-century Atlantic, this talk asks how Africans’ responses to Europeans’ accusations of fetishism re-map the concept’s entanglements with art history’s early development in eighteenth-century Europe. My sources are the testimonies of José Francisco Pereira and José Francisco Pedroso, two enslaved men born in present-day Benin, who appeared on trial before the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon in the summer of 1731. The pair was accused of feitiçaria (translated here as “fetishism” or “sorcery”) stemming from their manufacture of African-associated apotropaic objects and amulets for physical protection. And they objected to or explained away the accusation by re-classifying the objects using terms like “Mandinga” and “Relic Pouch.” I suggest the accused did not deploy these names as a kind of corrective to Europeans’ mislabeling, but rather to interrogate Inquisitors’ conceptions of their objects’ genealogies and valuations. If we are to understand, in Delinda Collier’s words, art history’s early formation as a “pidgin language in the theater of conquest,” what might Pereira and Pedroso have been saying to their European interrogators by defining their objects in this way? And given that these debates over objects took place in the Portuguese Inquisition, how might these terms impact our historical framing of not only African art history’s institutional origins, but its concomitant racializing mechanisms?