Honor and Risk: Recovering Afro-Atlantic Power and Its Objects from the Archives of Enslavement by Cécile Fromont

About

Cécile Fromont – Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

In the first half of the eighteenth century, African men and women enslaved or free, living in plantations or cities around the Atlantic, created empowered packets that protected them and their clients against physical, social, and spiritual vulnerability. These packets, though little known today, have deeply shaped the nature of power and the modes of its exercise in the Atlantic world since the era of the Enlightenment. The traces left of them in the archives are faint, fragmented, and marred by the violence that European religious and civil authorities tirelessly wielded against them and their makers in the hope to better understand their nature and contravene their powers.

What methods can historians devise to reconstitute the Afro-Atlantic knowledge and techniques lost in the destruction of the packets and the silencing of their makers? What procedures can scholars design to rescue from the archives of enslavement meaningful fragments that may bring back to life these ancestral objects? What are the risks inherent to such attempts?

This talk explores the possibilities and the dangers of recovering Afro-Atlantic power and its objects from the archives of enslavement and of honoring the humanity of empowered-packet makers by writing their life and deeds into the annals of human history.