Thursday, 30 January
4.00pm, Woodruff Library Jones Room
Matthew Francis Rarey, Oberlin College
On Maps, Race, and Diasporic Self-Fashioning in Early 19th-Century Brazil
Between 1816 and 1817, Anastácio de Sant’Anna, a pardo (mixed-race) artist active in Salvador, a major port city in northeastern Brazil, produced the Guia de Caminhantes (“Guide for Walkers”), an unprecedented manuscript atlas of Brazil and the Americas. Sant’Anna’s Guia is one of the few extant cartographic works produced in the slavery-era Americas by a Black artist, yet it has gone almost unmentioned in Portuguese and English-language scholarship. In this talk, Rarey provides an overview of the Guia and positions it in conversation with the emergent subfield of Black Geographies. Directly dialoguing with artworks and maps from the seventeenth century, he shows that Sant’Anna’s Guia interrogates connections between cartography, landscape painting, and the fashioning of racial subjectivity in colonial Brazil. Rarey then moves to argue that Sant’Anna used the Guia to advocate for the centrality, and mutual constitution, or Black and Indigenous histories just prior to Brazilian independence from Portugal, and in so doing forwards a vision of Blackness as non-diasporic: neither displaced nor uprooted, but rather indigenous to—and constitutive of—Sant’Anna’s nascent vision of a postcolonial Brazilian state.
Matthew Francis Rarey is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Art History at Oberlin College. His writings on Black Atlantic visual cultures have appeared in African Arts, The Art Bulletin, Arts, and Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World, among other venues. Rarey’s first book, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023), won multiple major prizes including the College Art Association’s 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Rarey is not at work on a book that rethinks the history of early modern cartography of the Americas through the diverse vantage points of Afro-Atlantic ritual specialists, maroon communities, and contemporary land rights’ activists in Brazil.