Why read Insignificant Things?

Book cover of Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic

Book description

In Insignificant Things Matthew Francis Rarey traces the history of the African-associated amulets that enslaved and other marginalized people carried as tools of survival in the Black Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Often considered visually benign by white Europeans, these amulet pouches, commonly known as "mandingas,"…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Insignificant Things as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Ana Lucia Araujo

Author

Objects intended to protect African men and women and their descendants were also part of the rich material culture of the Atlantic slave trade.

In this book, art historian Matthew Rarey explores the history of mandinga pouches, small amulets containing a variety of items such as Islamic prayers, herbs, shells, and hair. The book shows that these items were not at all insignificant things, but rather tangible traces of the histories of men, women, and children who were forcibly transported to the Americas and whose trajectories linked European, African, and American spiritual and material worlds.

From Ana's list on The best books on the material culture of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism.