Matthew Rarey’s Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic is the latest addition to scholarship on the knowledge produced by African individuals as they skillfully navigated the violent whims of enslavement and racial capitalism. Spanning the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Insignificant Things tracks an evolving, transatlantic discourse around bolsa de mandinga (translated literally as “mandinga pouch”): amulets with diverse materials contained within a fabric or leather pouch that were used for luck, love, and protection from personal violence. Across the Lusophone Atlantic, bolsas were employed ritualistically by many early modern subjects, but especially enslaved Africans in Brazil. These objects’ unassuming form, inherent mobility, and mélange of hidden contents simultaneously enamored and befuddled enslavers, yet these very qualities enabled their Black creators to endure the visual, economic, and physical hardships inflicted by racial slavery. Marshaling exceptional sources from the Portuguese Inquisition records, colonizers’ paintings and prints, and objects from continental and transatlantic African communities, Insignificant Things offers a novel art historical investigation of a set of objects explicitly “designed to avoid [visual] analysis” yet were anything but insignificant to the communities that relied on them for survival (5).

Several themes are worth highlighting at the outset. First and foremost to Rarey is the concept of discourse. Insignificant Things is not an “object history” per se, but rather a close textual and visual analysis of amulets’ role within an emergent early modern discourse. This discourse was shaped not only by slave traders and Portuguese inquisitors but also by the makers of bolsa de mandinga, known as mandingueiros. Second, Rarey deconstructs the role amulets played within an early Portuguese modern visual culture, one inherently tied to the construction of Blackness as both commodifiable and fungible. Insignificant Things captures how amulets’ form manipulated the “unwelcome gazes and close visual inspection” of racial slavery’s constant surveillance (5). Third, Rarey is persistent in his acknowledgment of the archive. Building from the archival turn in feminist Black studies and slavery studies, Insignificant Things asks: what are the ethics of analyzing objects that were never meant to be archivally known?

The first chapter, “Labels,” demonstrates how the term Mandinka, originally a West African ethnonym, was gradually decoupled from its geographic origins and ethnic identity to encompass a variety of objects, including feitiço (from which the term “fetish” originates). Yet, as Rarey demonstrates, Islamic traders and amulet-users in the Sahel had selectively used the ethnonym prior to the transatlantic slave trade for protection from displacement. The semantic confusion around mandinga demonstrates how terms referring to both objects and people not only emerged from European misapprehension of African individuals’ spiritual practices, but these individuals’ own use of such terms to build economic and kinship networks prior to and after the slave trade.

So, when, in 1704, the enslaved Jacques Viegas described himself as a Mina, a term used by traders to describe African captives from present-day Benin and Togo, rather than the object he was accused of using, Mandinga, he was building upon a centuries-long strategy of navigating what Rarey calls the “violence of ethnogenesis.” By the eighteenth century, ethnonyms like Mandinga and Mina were commonly employed to naturalize the exploitation of African labor, yet they were also repurposed by diasporic communities to forge networks of solidarity and spiritual resilience. Viegas’ decision to self-identify as Mina was thus potentially a strategic response to systemic violence inherent in labeling, demonstrating how African individuals, despite enduring the loss of kin, homelands, and spiritual traditions, persisted within oppressive systems of categorization. In turn, Rarey questions how the act of labelling still inflects diasporic African art histories.

If the label Mandinga suggests amulets contributed to discourses that defined Black individuals as tradeable commodities in the early modern world, bolsa de mandingas’ contents demonstrate how Africans engaged in processes of assemblage to interpret emerging networks of exchange, collection, and circulation. In chapter two, Rarey places bolsas in conversation with other early modern collecting practices, such as cabinets of curiosity, arguing that the internal contents of amulets—stones, paper, feathers, and flint—afforded mandingueiros a degree of control over “the systems of valuation and political and religious power shaping their lives” (74). While Inquisitors obsessively listed the contents of bolsas only to dismiss their efficacy, Africans actively incorporated global materials into their pouches to provoke but never grant their Inquisitors full revelation. Rarey calls this process “strategic occlusion,” and argues forcefully for its fundamental role in constructing the discourse of the fetish (75).

Amulets often included materials from multiple spiritual and economic value systems enslaved individuals were forced to endure. For example, by including altar stones, mandingueiros forced Inquisitors to “parse out a distinction between the forms of Catholicism they found acceptable and those they did not” (120). This practice is highlighted by Rarey’s lengthy analysis of José Francisco Pereira’s bolsa, which includes drawings of both an Arma Christi as well as feathers, objects integral to Vodun-derived practices across the diaspora. At first glance, these visual references might appear to be “syncretic” or “hybrid” results of African and European spiritualism. Rarey challenges such an approach by instead highlighting how Pereira’s assemblage was a long-standing strategy to grapple with the violent changes of value that had long characterized Vodun practice across the Atlantic before the terms “African” and “European” hardened.

The second half of the book turns to questions of the archive and visuality. Chapter three, “Markings,” engages productively with contemporary theorist Hortense Spillers’ canonical theorization of the “Hieroglyphics of the Flesh,” or the violent historical and discursive relationship between archival writings and the literal marks made on and against enslaved people. As the Inquisition sought to suppress bolsas and denounce suspected users—often turning other enslaved individuals into informants—paper decrees became instruments of surveillance that dictated life and death in the early modern Portuguese Empire. Rarey highlights how the inclusion of papers in bolsas were therefore a direct response to this nexus of archival production, surveillance, and bodily violence. Again, Rarey shines in his ability to foreground enslaved people’s conscious awareness of the systems of value unfolding around them, noting how bolsas were ultimately used to escape enslavement’s use of surveillance and bodily violation. Fittingly, the chapter concludes with a meditation on the (im)possibility of archival recovery. The amulets that mandingueiros trusted to protect them are, after all, those that violate them once again in Rarey’s monograph.

Chapter four, “Revolts” departs from the trial records within the eighteenth century to demonstrate how Yorùbá participants in the 1835 Revolt of the Malês in Bahia, Brazil used bolsas, called patuá by the nineteenth century, for insurgency. Giving historic weight to Fred Moten’s concept of “revolting objects,” Rarey charts an intra-Caribbean praxis of using amulets for protection during acts of insurrection. Unable to read the written contents (often in Arabic script) inside amulets, Inquisitors automatically located “rebelliousness in the unclassifiable and indecipherable” (180). No matter how hard the Inquisitors looked, the use of bolsas or patuá became associated with rebellion. Indeed, amulets became evidence deserving of a death sentence. Rarey forcefully argues that amulets’ form nevertheless attempted to undo the condition of surveillance and the “aesthetic-symbolic structures” of colonial visuality (207). Even though the patuás ultimately failed to protect those they adorned, their construction was itself a vision of an anticolonial future.

Rarey’s coda considers the link between resistance and visualization within histories of Black liberation. Somewhat provocatively, Rarey calls to decenter the Haitian Revolution’s predominant role in studies of Black liberation. This should not be construed as a suggestion to cease writing art histories of the Haitian Revolution, which are already too few. Instead, the conclusion should be understood as a prompt to place histories of Black resistance not solely on their outcomes, but rather on an evolving axis that reimagines new worlds in objects often deemed “insignificant”: both in their moment of reception and by the institution of art history itself. Most importantly, however, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic exemplifies what centering Black studies—the tenuous relationship between Blackness and objecthood, the rise of racial capitalism, the unnerving violences of disciplinarity, and the construction of slavery’s archive—gives to art history. Guided by Rarey’s methods, we must continue to critically examine the ostensibly insignificant practices of Black creators, especially those under extreme conditions of duress, those who often did not have access to fine arts mediums or literacy, and those whose objects were never preserved. Only then will art history fully grasp the profound significance of their survival strategies.