Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World

by James H. Sweet

Overview

Between 1730 and 1750, powerful healer and vodun priest Domingos Alvares traversed the colonial Atlantic world like few Africans of his time—from Africa to South America to Europe—addressing the profound alienation of warfare, capitalism, and the African slave trade through the language of health and healing. In Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, James H. Sweet finds dramatic means for unfolding a history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which healing, religion, kinship, and political subversion were intimately connected.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469609751
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	08/01/2013
Edition description:	1
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

James H. Sweet is Vilas-Jartz Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. His book Recreating Africa won the American Historical Association's 2004 Wesley Logan prize for the best book on the history of the African diaspora.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This exceptionally creative, engaging, and provocative book is a tour de force of historical imagination and sensitivity and a hallmark of Atlantic history." —Joseph C. Miller, University of Virginia

James Sweet's fascinating narrative is a superb social and cultural history of the eighteenth-century Lusophone Atlantic world. One will read this groundbreaking, extensively researched, and imaginative book with great interest." —Luis Nicolau Pares, Universidade Federal da Bahia

Editorial Reviews

A fine, well-constructed and cogently argued piece of microhistory." —The Americas

This book should become mandatory reading for graduate students as well as faculty working on Atlantic history. . . . The skillful prose of this work also should be a model for other historians." —Journal of World History

[This book] will be of significant interest to specialists of the Atlantic World, particularly those of the Black Atlantic, and will likely generate lively discussions in graduate seminars." —Register of The Kentucky Historical Society

Sweet offers not only a glimpse into the intellectual life of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world but perhaps even an epistemological model for the struggles of our own time." —HAHR

[A] laudable and exemplary new study. . . . This richly detailed account will be considered among the best of a generation of Black Atlantic histories." —International Journal of African Historical Studies

Demonstrates an interesting, well-written, and rigorous methodological approach to studying the commonalities of the life and politics of Domingo Alvares. . . . Sweet has produced a comprehensive examination of the African diaspora with emphasis on the Black Atlantic." —The Historian

[A] well-written narrative. . . . Sweet exposes one of the many ways in which African cultural practices profoundly shaped the interactions between 18th-century Africans and Europeans." —Journal of African American History

[An] insightful examination of the politics of healing." —Early American Literature

Domingos Alvares imaginatively re-creates the life of a fascinating character brought before the Portuguese Inquisition, and in so doing the book highlights the social and political ramifications of vodun-inspired healing practices and other forms of cultural diffusion linking the Bight of Benin to Brazil during the eighteenth century." —William and Mary Quarterly

Sweet's contribution to the literature is profound as he brings Africa to the center of an Atlantic historiography." —Latin American Research Review

From the Publisher