Cervantes’s Black castrato and the racial politics of timbre

Reviewed by: Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulation of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds Galen Brokaw Keywords Galen Brokaw, Lisa Voigt, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulation of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds, the New World, Colonialism, Spain, Captivity Voigt, Lisa . Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulation of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009. 339 pp. Almost immediately after J. H. Elliott originally published his argument some forty years ago about the "blunted" impact of the Americas on Europe in the early modern period, other scholars began challenging this view. Indeed, Elliott himself [End Page 443] subsequently reconsidered his understanding of this relationship. Over the last several decades, one of the most interesting fields of research has focused precisely on the nature of this impact. Whether directly or indirectly, Elliott's argument set forth the terms of a research question that has informed numerous studies. In Elliott's original argument, "blunted impact" referred to the idea that the discovery of, or encounter with, the New World did not have the kind of immediate effect that one might assume in retrospect. One might say that research that argues against this thesis does not refute the "bluntness" of the impact, but rather demonstrates the true nature of the metaphor: although on the surface, the effects of blunt trauma are not as immediately obvious or dramatic, they are far more extensive and profound than more acute injuries. In fact, blunt trauma may cause injuries below the surface with long-lasting effects that are often difficult to identify. Such difficulties are precisely what continue to make this field so productive and interesting. Lisa Voigt's recent book, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic, which is primarily a work of insightful textual analysis, does not take as its central concern the larger implications of the NewWorld impact, but her research emerges from, and is informed by, this field. Voigt broadens our understanding of the early modern period through an examination of the way captivity narratives function in the relationship between the Old and the New Worlds. The first chapter of Voigt's book explores the connection between accounts of Old World and New World captivity. She analyzes captivity narratives that appear in texts by Hans Staden, Cabeza de Vaca, Cervantes, Mascarenha, and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The main point here is not that New World narratives were necessarily more significant than Old World ones, but rather that they participate in the discourse of captivity narratives in the same way that other texts do. Voigt uncovers a dialogic relationship between Old and New World narratives that has gone unnoticed in previous scholarship. Her insightful textual analyses address the central question of the chapter while remaining grounded in a contextualization of the debates about verisimilitude and artifice that were being played out in these texts as well. The second chapter focuses on the final section of Garcilaso's La Florida del Inca, which includes a number of captivity narratives. Voigt argues that Garcilaso both explicitly and implicitly draws a parallel between the condition of captivity and that of exile. His treatment of captivity is particularly important for the larger thesis of Voigt's book because Garcilaso is conscious of the dialogic processes through which captives and exiles pass. Chapter 3 turns to the creole project of Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán's Cautiverio feliz. This autobiographical text recounts the "happy captivity" of the author among the Mapuche of Chile in the seventeenth century. Pineda's account differs significantly from the others analyzed up to this point in that it conveys a [End Page 444] much more conciliatory perspective while avoiding the cultural transformations that characterize the earlier narratives of captivity. Pineda does not "go native" as do the Spanish captives in Florida. The mediating role evolves through his experience of captivity rather than as a result of an initial cultural transformation and a subsequent return to Spanish civilization. The fourth chapter moves to José de Santa Rita Durão's eighteenth-century Portuguese...

Reviewed by: Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic by Peter C. Mancall Shepard Krech III Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic. By Peter C. Mancall. Early Modern Americas. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 197. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4966-8.) In recent years an active research topic on the early modern era has been the intersection of human beings and the natural world (or "nature"). From all sides have come significant works investigating the science of describing natural history and the invention of exoticism and the endemic or the indigenous. Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic explores the natural world as conceived in the sixteenth-century Atlantic basin. With footings in both history and anthropology, Peter C. Mancall is well positioned to plumb the topic—and the result, which started as the Mellon Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, proves the adage that good things can and at times do come in small packages. The author regards this work as an "extended essay" (p. x). With a core text of 137 pages, generous spacing and margins, and engaging illustrations (including twelve color plates), it delights as it enlightens at every turn. Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic consists of three chapters, a postscript, and a note on sources. Mancall states that he has drawn on images, printed texts, folklore, and oral history for his analysis. In fact, the first two are clearly of paramount importance, and images are both central to and a great strength of this work. In the first chapter, Mancall pushes the frontiers of the other-than-natural world, both to establish the boundaries of the natural world and to address how people at the time knew what they knew. His answers pertain principally to the Europeans, as we see (and read about) both monstra marina on oceanic maps and curious beings, human or not (such as bipedal creatures with faces on their chests), on continental maps. Mancall wonders if the Europeans really believed in such boundary-bursting creatures, but he also notes that in 1500 the wondrous categories of indigenous people were not that different. But as the sixteenth century unfolded, the wonders in European cultural conceptions yielded to newer methodologies of description and explanation embedded increasingly in an encyclopedic and, in citations, authoritative science. The second chapter explores what Mancall calls a "new ecology," drawing extensively on the extraordinary visual evidence in maps linked to Nicolas [End Page 412] Vallard of Dieppe and António de Holanda—including the Atlas Miller (1519) and in the Histoire Naturelle des Indes (circa 1590s). The maps, for example, contrast fully clothed, city-dwelling Europeans with naked, forest-dwelling native people of the New World and Africa. They reflect strong interests in commodification and trade. They depict not just strange people, some feathered in their wear (and others cannibals—a common trope), but also novel mammals and birds. The maps and other materials also contrast the deforested lands and cities of Europe with the forested lands and architecturally simpler living spaces of Africa and the Western Hemisphere. That change was coming to the latter, however, is reflected in images of commodification and of the cutting of valuable trees in the New World; a portent, ominous or not, of the future as well as a symbol of the broader Columbian exchange of plants with dietary or medicinal value and other commodities. Chapter 3, "The Landscape of History," is a case study of the manipulation by the English of an imagery of landscape and people originally conceived with what we would now call ethnographic intent, in order that it might be reconciled with their understanding of their claim on Indian lands as legitimate. Mancall draws on depictions of Algonquians on the Carolina coast—John White's watercolors, Thomas Harriot's text, Richard Hakluyt's editions, and Theodor de Bry's engravings—to discuss processes of selection and alteration from painting to engraving that benefited the promoters in England and not the Native people in Carolina. Again, analysis of the visual materials deeply informs the discussion. The postscript, "The Theater of Insects," draws its title...

Reviewed by: Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds Pauline Turner Strong (bio) Lisa Voigt. Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg. 352 pp. 5 illus., notes, index. ISBN 978-0807859445, $24.95. This theoretically sophisticated volume by a specialist in Iberian literature demonstrates the value of a broadly comparative approach to imperial representation. Astutely addressing the scarcity of serious considerations of Portuguese and Spanish narratives in the voluminous English-language scholarship on captivity, Lisa Voigt connects Iberian narratives of captivity in the New World both to their Anglo-American counterparts and to early modern accounts of Christians taken captive by Moors and Turks. The results of Voigt's disciplinary boundary crossing are salutary for scholarship on the representation of identity, alterity, and experience in both the Iberian and English imperial worlds. Considerably more centered on Iberia than on England, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic includes close readings of the representation of captivity by three authors: the Peruvian historian el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the Chilean soldier Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, and the Brazilian friar José de Santa Rita Durão. The three case studies are framed by theoretical and comparative discussions of the circulation of representations of shipwreck and captivity throughout the early modern world. Voigt is particularly interested in the "valorization of the captive's authority and knowledge" (24) in works that predate the Scientific Revolution and the age of the novel. The focus on early claims to the authority of firsthand experience makes Writing Captivity relevant to readers interested in many forms of biographical and auto biographical writing, not only captivity narratives. Voigt opens the book with a general consideration of the connections between accounts of Old and New World captivity—connections exemplified in visual imagery, tropes, and epistemological practices that "traversed linguistic, national, and imperial borders as fluidly as the voyagers themselves" (47). In a chapter that moves from the well-known captivity narratives of Hans Staden (in Brazil) and Cabeza de Vaca (on the Gulf of Mexico) to tales of Algerian captivity in the novels of Cervantes, Voigt is particularly interested in the [End Page 560] interplay between discourses of truth and strangeness. She argues persuasively that "true histories" of shipwreck and captivity played an important role in the early modern "reconceptualization of versimilitude and the marvelous" (49). Another important theme of Writing Captivity is the "transformative power of captivity and the empowerment of the transformed captive" (105). The authors of each of Voigt's central captivity narratives—a Peruvian mestizo, a Chilean creole, and a Brazilian exile—were not all captives, but each was familiar with the travails and power of the cultural mediator. Garcilaso de la Vega, a descendant of Incan nobles, included a narrative of the captivity of Juan Ortiz in his La Florida del Inca, published in Lisbon in 1605. Captured in Florida in 1528 by the indigenous chief Hirrihigua, Juan Ortiz was, according to Garcilaso, saved from torture and death by the intervention of the chief's wife and daughters. Taken under the protection of a neighboring chief, Mucozo, Ortiz served as an intermediary between the chief and Hernando de Soto when the latter arrived in Florida in 1539, eventually becoming a guide and interpreter for the Soto expedition. Also exemplifying the transformative and empowering nature of captivity is Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán's account of his "happy captivity" in 1629 among the Mapuche (or Araucanians) of Chile. A hybrid of personal memoir and political tract, Pineda's book-length manuscript (unpublished until the nineteenth century) contains numerous digressions, including examples of Spanish treachery and cruelty that Pineda viewed as key to the continuation of Mapuche hostilities against the Spanish. As a captive, Pineda came to construct what Voigt calls a "creole identity and authority" (172)—a process that involved destabilizing boundaries between the "civilized" and the "barbarous," followed by drawing new boundaries that incorporated...

Early Modern Atlantic - The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. By Pablo F. Gómez. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 314. 29.95 paper. - Volume 75 Issue 4

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 186–188 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.18 Book Review Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA The word “religion” appears only seven times in Pablo Gómez’s extraordinary book, The Experiential Caribbean. Yet the paucity of references is, perhaps paradoxically, an indication that this brilliant study should be foundational to studies of American religion. Gómez, an historian of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written a book about healing and knowledge production that critiques the category of religion in practice, rather than in theory. The Experiential Caribbean explores the “healthcare marketplace” of the early modern Caribbean, focusing on Black ritual practitioners and health specialists. Goméz’s central argument, which is directed primarily at historians of science and medicine, emphasizes that these individuals were not merely “informers” who helped European collectors create the “New Science” of the seventeenth century. Instead, they were themselves responsible for an “experiential revolution ” that emphasized empirical knowledge production over “first principles” and tradition. While the category of “religion” is not Gómez’s central focus, his findings— and his argument—should be of interest to all scholars of American religion. The “ritual practitioners” and “health specialists” who are the focus of his book, after Katharine Gerbner 187 all, were called brujas, sorcerers, and witches by European authorities. In the archival records that Gómez explores, which include Inquisition records as well as a wide range of underutilized medical texts and recipe books, they are agents of “superstition” whose integration of Catholic rituals into their healing practices was suspect at best, and criminal at worst. Yet even as these practitioners were condemned by ecclesiastical authorities, they were widely sought out not only by Black and indigenous people in need of care, but also by Europeans, including church officials. Their integration of a wide range of material, ritual, and verbal practices proved to be effective and attractive within the competitive healthcare marketplace of the early modern Caribbean. Due to the fact that Black practitioners were marginalized as religious “others ” and excluded from histories of medicine, Gómez makes the conscious choice not to use religion-related terminology in his own narrative. Terms like “witch” and “shaman,” Gómez explains, “betoken the very language … used to condemn black ways of knowing” away from categories such as “rational” and “enlightened” (11–12). Instead, he opts for phrases like “ritual specialist” and “health specialist,” as well as Mohán, a term of Amerindian origin, to describe the Black healers who are the focus of his book. The first two chapters, “Arrivals” and “Landscapes,” set the stage and describe how Africans and their descendants made up the majority of the population in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. These individuals drew on African precedents and Amerindian examples as well as European traditions in order to create a “vibrant, if ruthless, cultural economy of healing and diseasing” (38). Implicit in Gómez’s description of this early modern world is a critique of traditional debates about African traditions in the Atlantic world, which tend to argue that Africans and their descendants either “retained” African culture or that they participated in a process of “creolization.” Gómez sidesteps this historiographical quagmire by arguing that Black practitioners gained expertise and authority through their travels. Chapter three, “Movement,” argues that in the competitive healthcare marketplace of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, incorporation was key to success , and healing traditions were not “enclosed” (85). In fact, the dislocation that characterized the seventeenth-century Caribbean weakened structures of power within the multiple healing and religious traditions in the region and “fostered the development of open, omnivorous epistemologies” (87). Significantly, Gómez also repositions the concept of movement away from the Atlantic, and towards interior mobility: the movement of ritual practitioners inland from cities like Cartageña on rivers and through diverse communities. On a related point, he critiques recent scholarship that has emphasized the transfer of knowledge solely from indigenous and Black practitioners to European collectors...

At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

Wagschal, Steven. The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006. The notion of jealousy has been mostly ignored in studies of Spanish Golden Age literature, perhaps because there is such an intense interest in questions of honor, and because it seems such a prevalent, obvious and yet slippery concept. Steven Wagschal thus fills an important void in Golden Age studies, examining this compound emotion that is represented in a varied and paradoxical manner: “It was a tempest, thunder and lightning, but also fog, cloud and air; a plague, rabies, poison, monster, but sometimes just lowly mud” (2). Wagschal’s book ranges from Cervantes’ prose works to Góngora’s complex poetic experiments and from Lope de Vega’s comedies to his more disturbing honor dramas and tragedies. In this thoughtful and intriguing study, Steven Wagschal addresses the aesthetics, epistemology and morality of the period, as well as issues of race, class and gender. Wagschal’s analysis moves with ease from early modern conceptualizations of jealousy (Descartes, Vives) to contemporary approaches to this compound emotion. He even turns to classical antiquity to develop motifs from Ovid and Virgil and to unravel classical myths that impinge upon the works discussed. Wagschal thus evolves complex and enlightening responses to these issues, raising topics relevant to both the early modern period and our contemporary situations, while at the same time focusing on the question of amorous jealousy. The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 turns to two classic “honor plays” by Lope, Los comendadores de Córdoba and Peribáñez, in order to show how Lope includes jealousy as an integral component of honor and “frequently motivates the protagonists’ change of mental state between the polar opposites of Spanish Baroque epistemology,” that is, from engaño to desenga ño. But Wagschal clearly shows that jealousy is not the purview of the protagonist. In Los comendadores de Córdoba, for example, Beatriz is jealous of her husband’s absence because she is “transposing her awareness of her own illicit desire to her husband’s consciousness” (28). And, the play also goes beyond questions of honor and rationality in order to mirror the historical and political situation of the period, where the kings were in the process of consolidating power. The play thus demonstrates “that the king’s word is to be upheld no matter how gruesome the crime and how intuitively ‘unjust’ it may be” (4041 ). Taking as its cue Beatriz’s emotions, Chapter 2 examines women’s jealousy in La celosa Arminda and El perro del hortelano. As opposed to men, women never murder for jealousy. Indeed, these plays evince, for Wagschal, the relationship between power and gender in the Spanish comedia. Thus, he links Armida to the Roman Juno, who was constantly jealous, “but never a match for Jupiter” (61). As for Diana in El perro del hortelano, she merely desires what others want. Both women protagonists show women’s weakness and Reseñas 109 irrationality. For Wagschal, the representation of jealousy in these plays help to support the hegemonic order, particularly in terms of gender. Chapter 3 concludes the analysis of Lope’s plays by contrasting La discreta enamorada with El castigo sin venganza. The purpose of this chapter is to show that jealousy can be portrayed very differently not just in cases of gender, but also of genre. While in the first play the emotions of jealousy are trivialized, in the second they acquire great depth and complexity. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze Cervantes’ El celoso extremeño and Persiles y Sigismunda respectively. The fourth chapter includes an innovative and provocative analysis of Cervantes’ famous novela. For Wagschal, the tale represents the old married man as a Jewish converso, a non-Christian Other. Thus, Cervantes parodies the ending of Lope’s honor plays such as Los comendadores de Córdoba . In his novela: “Cervantes attempts to portray jealousy as neither honorable nor befitting a hero of the Christian reconquest such as Lope’s Veinticuatro ; rather, for Cervantes, jealousy is an obsessive feeling experienced by a cruel, old Semite” (119). While Cervantes seems to condemn jealousy as a vice, this negative...

Race and Science in Global Histories

Reviewed by: To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic ed. by Rachel B. Herrmann Heather R. Peterson (bio) To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic. Edited by Rachel B. Herrmann. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019. Pp. v, 282. $54.21 cloth; $20.96 paper) Rachel Herrmann’s new edited volume To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic illustrates the centrality of cannibalism to ideas about savagery and colonialism, complicating ideas regarding the reality and impetus of cannibalism among native groups like the Tupinamba as well as Europeans in the New World. As a pedagogical tool, Herrmann’s introduction provides a textbook example of a thorough historiography of cannibalism studies, breaking down the major questions, arguments, and complications. She then fits each of the contributions into their respective historiographical debate highlighting new strands and connections. Herrmann notes that there are three main questions being asked: did cannibalism actually exist? What does the representation of cannibalism tell us? And microhistories elucidating questions of identity and meaning (p. 4). Her chapter “The Black People were not Good to Eat” examines cannibalism during the middle passage, Olaudah Equiano’s reversal of the cannibal narrative, and the way that hunger was used both as a tool to control slaves and seamen, while refusing food was a way to re-appropriate power within a very unequal dynamic (pp. 195–213). [End Page 491] The two strongest essays look at cannibalism and the European psyche. In “Spaniards, Cannibals, and the Eucharist in the New World,” Rebecca Earle examines the tension between Spanish justifications for conquest, based largely on the Indian’s “excesses,” including cannibalism, drunkenness, and sodomy, and their own cannibalistic experiences in the New World as recorded by Peter Martyr and López de Gómora. Finally, she notes that the transubstantiation taking place in the Eucharist made it difficult for Spanish writers to distinguish eating the body of Christ from the anthropophagy of the Indians, and while they warned Indians not to eat people, they were eager for them to “hunger avidly for the body of Christ” (p. 94). Matt Williamson’s piece “Imperial Appetites: Cannibalism and Early Modern Theatre” examines the 1622 play The Sea Voyage in relation to the burgeoning capitalism of the English Atlantic. He argues that cannibalism in theatre was frequently used to parody the excessive consumption and greed of the age, noting that these plays did not present cannibalism as “the property of an ostensibly un-civilized Other but rather and index of what those who were ostensibly civilized could become or even of what they might already be” (p. 125). In the play, a group of pirates are stranded on a barren island, remarkable because it contradicted the projected image of the bounty of the New World and because it mirrored contemporaneous moments of hunger like the Starving Time in Jamestown. Williamson parses the text of the play comparing the “sharing” out of the victim, a young woman, with “shares” in the Virginia Company and the King’s Men, who performed the play. Here cannibalism “provided a way to explore the playwrights’—and their audience’s—anxious complicity with the capitalist appetites The Sea Voyage ostensibly condemned” (p. 134). The rest of the essays move more or less chronologically and geographically. Elena Daniele provides an interesting chapter looking at the way merchants in Italy acquired news of the New World and her people. Kelly Watson looks at “Sex and Cannibalism,” and Jessica [End Page 492] Hower has a complicated chapter tracing a microhistory of the Tudors alongside English expansionist propaganda. The weakest contribution is Gregory Smithers’s “Rituals of Consumption,” which examines cannibalism in both “rumors” and myths of “Native Southerners” (a questionable concept) arguing that Europeans, who had an “urgent need to establish order” created the Indians as bloodthirsty savages (p. 27). Overall, the volume provides a fascinating glimpse into the forces that created the Atlantic World and European tropes regarding greed, consumption, and cannibalism. Heather R. Peterson HEATHER R. PETERSON teaches history at the University of South Carolina Aiken. Her book manuscript “Consuming the Miserable Indians” examines the...

As the title of the book, edited by Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster, Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, suggests, its contributions highlight the interconnection of religious and political factors which influenced and shaped the colonisation of the eastern North American continent, in New England and New France (as well as one case of Mexico), around 1550–1760. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster have put together a meticulously edited book, well documented by the authors and with a number of cross-references among the articles. (Unfortunately, there is no general bibliography at the end of the book or of each article, which makes it necessary to work one's way through each apparatus of endnotes.) According to the editors' introduction (pp. 1–15) the explorers of the early modern world were well equipped with the Bible (whereas those of the Spanish world would have had access to the book itself only infrequently and if so, in Latin) and other identity-strengthening reading. Through this and their experiences, eventually all of them would be faced with the link between religion and empire, which, as Gregerson and Juster write, can be seen as a causal, oppositional, dialectical, or affiliative relationship. Ideology and commerce also went together, and religion served as an important structuring factor in establishing the colonies and building the imperial nations.

When writing about the early modern Atlantic, historians commonly approach their topic from the perspective of the modern nation-state. Jews allow us to see how a focus on nation-based Atlantics can sometimes obscure the actual experience of life in the early modern Atlantic. In what follows, this chapter focuses on Jewish deathways as a way to understand Jewish religious practice and identity in the New World. Dutch interest in the New World began in the 1590s as the Dutch were fighting for their independence from Spain. Other Jewish migrants from Recife found their way to English Caribbean colonies. The representation of the biblical Esther pleading her case before King Ahasuerus is almost a line-for-line copy of a woodcut from a Christian Latin Bible published in Lyon in 1562. Surinam's Creole cemetery holds the descendants of manumitted slaves Photograph by Rachel Frankel. As Surinam's Jewish mulattoes attest, the boundaries of the Hebrew Nation—like the boundaries of European nation-states—were permeable and contested.

KNOWLEDGE AND HEALING IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC - The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. By Pablo Gómez. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xxii + 314. 29.95, paperback (9781469630878). - Volume 59 Issue 2

Historians and anthropologists, from Melville Herskovits to David Eltis, have detailed the intimate relationship between capitalism and slavery and long acknowledged modernity's cultural debt to Africans and African Americans. In the process, argues Herman Bennett in African Kings and Black Slaves, scholars have superimposed a subsuming “liberal order” over early Atlantic historiography (p. 20). The overemphasis on commodification and race, in particular, overlooks a critical fifteenth-century phase in the genealogy of slavery. The early Atlantic was not articulated through regimes of property or racialized difference, Bennett argues, but rather through Afro-European logics of sovereignty and dispossession through which liberalism, chattel slavery, and the modern economy would later emerge.In six concise chapters, Bennett engages a wide historiography and offers new perspectives on early Atlantic legal culture, political and religious authority, pageantry, and slavery. Bennett complicates the narrative that Europeans rendered Africans into property and capital through Roman law and Christian theology. He draws from the Catholic legal corpus of extra ecclesiam and humanist writings on sovereignty and natural law to offer careful reappraisals of the Romanus Pontifex (1455) and similar authoritative texts that dealt with non-Christians. Bennett argues that as trading vessels plied the early Atlantic, ecclesiastical authorities restricted Iberian plunder in Africa, just as they had in Andalusia, with legal precedents from Pope Innocent IV (1243) and others. Secular authorities, too, drew from Hostiensian arguments that limited illegal encroachment and dispossession. Pontiffs and legal scholars drew from a rich crusading legalese to shield non-Christians from unjust war and enslavement. Thus, while Roman law and Christian theology sanctioned slavery through just war and rescate, they also helped curtail the development of chattel slavery in the fifteenth-century Atlantic.The strength of African kings also helped curtail enslavement by Europeans. As Portuguese and Castilian monarchs extended trade in Guinea, slavers and traders approached territories with strong lords who limited Europeans to fortified trading factories along the coast. Despite princely ambitions, Bennett claims, slavery's marriage to capitalism in the fifteenth century was bridled by the twin forces of strong African lordship and a dynamic Catholic legal system. A matrix of civil, feudal, and ecclesiastical precedents evolved to extend dominium and imperium to non-Christians, allowing African lords and subjects the right to live outside of grace without European intrusion. While substantial literature details the strength of these African polities elsewhere, Bennett's nuanced analysis of the centrality of canon law to limiting European expansion is a welcome addition to the historiography.African Kings and Black Slaves does not rebuff the history of early Iberian commercial interest in Guinea. Rather, it situates fifteenth-century Christian institutions and Afro-European politics at the center of a discussion of modernity. Drawing on the influential works of Paul Gilroy and Alexander Weheliye, Bennett locates modernity in Atlantic slavery not vis-à-vis liberty or the free market but through Christian dogma and political absolutism. As ecclesiastical and secular authorities recognized non-Christian dominium by Moorish and African kings, Bennett points out, they also stripped other Jews, Moors, and non-Christian Africans of corporate rights, instituting two key features of modernity: legal individualism and the erosion of corporate identity. Iberian trade increased along the African coast as clerical attempts to define sovereignty waned against the growth in secular authority. Bennett points to a rupture of the oikos (economy) as it eclipsed the polis (politics) following sustained European engagement with African slavery. Iberians came to understand sovereignty increasingly through the lens of African political theater, pageantry, captivity, and trade regimes. Europeans developed new slave taxonomies, engaged in African ritual diplomacy, and eventually adopted Atlantic slavery as a baseline of power in early modern absolutist regimes.Bennett's nuanced look at the intersections of Christianity, slavery, and imperial politics successfully engages Gilroy's thesis of modernity and pushes it back to the fifteenth century. His findings—that much of early modern Iberian political theory developed outside Europe, in Africa, among lords, theologians, and merchants equal in trade relations and governed by shared ideologies of sovereignty and dispossession—are provocative and should be debated by students and scholars alike. Bennett's clarity is as sharp as his criticism, which at times borders on piercing. His theoretical interventions are exciting. The analysis of the genesis of modernity through the logic of enslavement under slavery's relationship to imperial governance and church dogma might not transcend the “liberal order” as claimed, but it anchors the discourse more firmly in the history of religious legal practice and politics. African Kings and Black Slaves is one of the boldest and most successful attempts yet to engage the fields of African studies, history, and critical theory equally.

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic

Brazil received the largest number of Africans enslaved into the Americas: nearly five million by some estimates. Thus, Brazil became the world’s largest slavocracy. But slavery was not the only experience available to Africans and Brazilians of African descent in slavery-era Brazil. Numerically, Afro-Brazilians dominated the arts in colonial Brazil. However, very few of those artists and artisans, many of whom were enslaved, are known by name today. Free Afro-Brazilian artists, such as Aleijadinho, Mestre Valentim, and Teófilo de Jesus, on the other hand, fared far better. In this article, I turn to these three mixed-race artists’ works and what little is known of their lives, not only as exemplary Afro-Brazilian artists but also as some of the most important artists of Brazil’s late colonial period, where they had the greatest impact on the artistic developments in their home regions. These artists’ careers thus illustrate how artists of African descent contributed to and defined urban and sacred spaces in the early modern Atlantic. This is therefore an invitation to look at Afrodescendants’ role in early modern art beyond the anonymity of slavery and static representation.