Staff profile

I am a specialist in the written, visual, and performative cultures that connect Iberian and West African historical worlds. 

My current research is focused on the notions of artifice – artifice understood as ingenuity and craft, as well as fiction, falsification, and deception – that were formulated at the messy intersections of West African and Iberian sacred and commercial spheres, and their relationship to understandings of how truth and value are produced

This research has taken shape in two different projects. 

My first book project – Before the Fetish: Artifice and Trade in Early Modern West Africa – is a study of the origination of the idea of “the fetish” in the archives of the creole trading enclaves of early modern West Africa. Through a literary analysis of a multilingual archive of Portuguese, Spanish, Cape-Verdean and French chronicles, merchant accounts, missionary letters and Inquisition trials, the book traces the Atlantic-African itineraries of a Portuguese discourse and imaginary of feitiçaria, understood as a set of magical techniques. It is the first study to assemble and theorize a corpus of the original forms described as feitiços, hechizos, fetissos, fetiches, and fetishes – etymological and material precursors to what later came to be known in ethnographic discourse as fetish-objects –, ranging from instruments of trade (like the Akan gold-weights) to the Afro-Atlantic amulets known as bolsas de mandinga and even counterfeit and stolen relics. 

 My second project – The Mandinga Experience: Illusion and Proof in Early Black Lisbon– has begun as a focused study of the 1690 Lisbon Inquisition case of a Cape-Verdean illusionist and mandingueiro Patrício de Andrade, denounced for putting on “experiências” (that is, demonstrations) of bodily invulnerability that were so convincing, that no one could believe he had not made a pact with the devil. Building on this case, the larger project reconstructs and interprets the theatrical repertoire, meanings of experience, and notions of proof put forward by a set of African illusionists active in Brazil, West Central Africa and Portugal, known collectively as the mandingueiros, as they faced the Inquisition.

I also work on the role of translators and intermediaries in the formation of slaving supply chains and slave-trading ideologies; African impostors and con artists in Spain and Portugal; on creolization and the larger linguistic geographies of the Atlantic slave trade; treasure-hunting and imaginaries of the underground in Galicia; among other things.  I hold degrees in Comparative Literature and Iberian Cultural Studies and am trained in Art History as well as West African languages and aesthetic traditions.