Main Content
Date of lecture: January 24, 2024
Abstract
In 1518, a severe smallpox epidemic swept the Caribbean and American coasts. Subsequently, in the 1520s, enslaved Africans, predominantly Senegambians, waged the first slave revolt in the Americas. Drawing on early modern European (predominantly Portuguese) chronicles about West Africans’ holistic community healing strategies, this paper argues that revolt and marronage were geopolitical, ecological, social, material, and spiritual responses to the smallpox epidemic and other community health threats that Iberian colonialism posed in the sixteenth-century Caribbean. Africanists have long observed that health crises were pretexts for political and social transformation. West and West Central Africans associated epidemic diseases, especially smallpox epidemics, with geopolitical upheavals and transformations. Deities and sacred forces who controlled geopolitical claims and governed community ecologies, notably forests and groves, were also capable of inflicting or relieving smallpox and other contagious flesh disorders in many African cosmologies. Africanists have also observed the centrality of healers and healing guilds in early modern and pre-colonial African geopolitics and sovereignty claims. This paper reappraises early modern European chronicles for evidence of West and West Central African community health management strategies. I argue that Africans migrated these praxes to the Caribbean. They are evident in the sixteenth-century slave revolts and burgeoning maroon societies. This paper resituates revolt and marronage as public healing and community health strategies that countered the health consequences of European slavery and colonialism. Furthermore, this work expands our concept of the Black radical tradition to account for the role of healers and community health in the process of geopolitical claims-making.
Short Bio
Dr. Elise A. Mitchell is an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton University. She has published her research in The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of the Early Republic, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, and various edited volumes. Her essays have appeared in Black Perspectives, The Funambulist, Slate, and The Atlantic. She is working on a book manuscript, titled Morbid Geographies: Enslavement, Epidemics, and Embodiment in the Early Modern Atlantic World, about how enslaved Africans contended with smallpox epidemics between roughly 1500 and 1800.