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Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World
Between 1730 and 1750, powerful healer and vodun priest Domingos Álvares 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 Álvares, 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.
320 pages, Paperback
First published February 10, 2011
16 people are currently reading
173 people want to read
About the author
James H. Sweet
7 books3 followersJames 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.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
October 27, 2019
Sweet effectively conveyed the interconnectedness of transatlantic migrations, forced and otherwise, and I was persuaded by his argument that African practices had just as strong of an influence on the development of transatlantic culture as anything European. However. All that I liked about the book was ruined when I realized after finishing it that all of the rich detail and narratives re Alvares’ healing practices came from his accusers, per his Inquisition file, which was Sweet’s main source. It would have been different if Sweet had framed his account accordingly, but he never explicitly acknowledges it, instead relating it as historical fact and portraying Alveras’ denial during his trial as his way of manipulating imperial discourse. I just can’t get on board with that.
January 9, 2020
One of the best history books I have read cover to cover. Follows the journey of an African slave and shows his role as an autonomous figure. Eventually ends up in Portugal as a part of the Inquisition, showing white fear.
November 15, 2020
As a student of African history I had been waiting so long to read this book. This is the historian's craft at its peak - a deep contextualization and interrogation of primary sources pulling from specialized knowledge across multiple disciplines - for a purpose, to strengthen us in the knowledge that the struggles we live through are not new, and that when the world-age goes dark around us, we must understand resistance as healing and healing as resistance, and always seek to make new connections.
July 27, 2021
It’s good to know that I can still be awed by a feat of historical reconstruction. As an attempt to recreate an entire era through the life of one individual, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything better.
February 25, 2015
I love reading things I normally wouldn't and this one was easy to get behind. Not easy , but worth getting behind.
July 14, 2025
An excellent example of how microhistory can speak to multiple aspects of a given historiography. Sweet at times treads a fine line between speculation and reconstruction, yet he nevertheless enriches our conception of what “creolization” precisely meant to those who experienced it in the Atlantic world.
January 29, 2022
Brilliant. Believe the hype.
September 5, 2024
okayyyy big fan of the final chapter there that was a really good conclusion
November 7, 2013
This is a well written and well researched book. It's rare when something so intellectually stimulating is also exciting you to find out what happens next. That's the value of having a 'main character' whose personage and exploits simultaneously challenge a prevailing form of African historiography. By this, I mean that Sweet constructs Domingos as a character who exists at two levels—one as the actor in a narrative whose scenes move fluidly from Dahomey, to Brazil, to Portugal; the other as an attempt to represent a kind of African who has been systematically written 'out' of previous histories due to the conceptual baggage embedded in Western historiography. Sweet, in many ways succeeds in both tasks, producing a history that is both compelling and thought-provoking. At the same time, I have no doubt that his reconstruction of Domingos’ life remains vastly different from however Domingos would have represented it.
One way Domingos seems to present a challenge from a historiographical perspective is in Sweet's recourse to psychological categories to get us ‘closer’ to Domingos’ lived experience. Throughout, we’re trying to divine his true intentions, his consciousness, his motives. Yet I felt many of these concepts of knowing the self are rooted in a particular (modern) Western conception of human nature that at times has the feel of behaviorism (‘this happened so Domingos did this’). I think that the amount of psychological language used to ‘get in Domingos’ head’ raises a question that at least needed to be addressed more explicitly in a work that it is otherwise so sensitive to the dangers of appropriating Western conceptions to understand African politics, kin networks, and spiritual practices of healing. Though much less problematic than Stephanie Smallwood’s work, I would have liked to see a similar sensitivity in the imagining of Domingo’s ‘interior’ thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the world. Historian of Psychology Kurt Danziger has written a lot on these dangers (Naming the Mind and Marking the Mind being two excellent examples that come to mind), and his work is worth checking out.
One question I had while reading was about the the contemporary stakes in ‘recovering’ Domingos’ lost history. On the one hand, all histories seem to require historical imagination, but why does Domingos story, in particular, need to be told? Why in this way? What are the politics of it? I realize that Domingos is not just a cool story; it is a rebuke of previous historiography on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and therefore a very necessary one for African historians to read. But I wonder if there’s a still broader contemporary necessity animating the questions that Sweet poses. I am thinking about his attention to the fluidity of cultural practices, acts of translation, new conceptualizations of the political—all these resonate with contemporary debates about multiculturalism, gender, and, difference. What does Domingos have to say to questions such as these? A lot, I suppose, and that's the interesting thing about historiography and how its reconstruction of the past is (perhaps necessarily) a reconstruction of the present.
Another frustration in this work was the under-theorized role of the intellectual in the context of social theory. I took Sweet's use of 'intellectual' to be riffing on Gramsci, who saw the role of the intellectual as constitutive of hegemonic political orders. Gramsci argued Italian intellectuals produced a false consciousness in the Italian proletariat that suppressed their (true) revolutionary consciousness. Sweet positions Domingos as a counter intellectual to the hegemonies of Dahomey and Portuguese Brazil, whose performance of spiritual healing serves as a powerful (and therefore dangerous) form of politics critical of the prevailing orders. This is how Domingos’ success at forging a large kin group can be described as his “genius;” every new initiate represents a subversion of Catholicism and Portuguese colonialism. This also goes a way to answering how Sweet can claim Domingos’ actions threatened the institutions of slavery while he helped to restore slaves’ productivity. The answer would seem to be that as Domingos ‘helps’ the slave masters, he increases his own renown and secures his reputation as having access to a form of power that threatens Dahomey and Portugal enough to get him twice exiled.
One way Domingos seems to present a challenge from a historiographical perspective is in Sweet's recourse to psychological categories to get us ‘closer’ to Domingos’ lived experience. Throughout, we’re trying to divine his true intentions, his consciousness, his motives. Yet I felt many of these concepts of knowing the self are rooted in a particular (modern) Western conception of human nature that at times has the feel of behaviorism (‘this happened so Domingos did this’). I think that the amount of psychological language used to ‘get in Domingos’ head’ raises a question that at least needed to be addressed more explicitly in a work that it is otherwise so sensitive to the dangers of appropriating Western conceptions to understand African politics, kin networks, and spiritual practices of healing. Though much less problematic than Stephanie Smallwood’s work, I would have liked to see a similar sensitivity in the imagining of Domingo’s ‘interior’ thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the world. Historian of Psychology Kurt Danziger has written a lot on these dangers (Naming the Mind and Marking the Mind being two excellent examples that come to mind), and his work is worth checking out.
One question I had while reading was about the the contemporary stakes in ‘recovering’ Domingos’ lost history. On the one hand, all histories seem to require historical imagination, but why does Domingos story, in particular, need to be told? Why in this way? What are the politics of it? I realize that Domingos is not just a cool story; it is a rebuke of previous historiography on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and therefore a very necessary one for African historians to read. But I wonder if there’s a still broader contemporary necessity animating the questions that Sweet poses. I am thinking about his attention to the fluidity of cultural practices, acts of translation, new conceptualizations of the political—all these resonate with contemporary debates about multiculturalism, gender, and, difference. What does Domingos have to say to questions such as these? A lot, I suppose, and that's the interesting thing about historiography and how its reconstruction of the past is (perhaps necessarily) a reconstruction of the present.
Another frustration in this work was the under-theorized role of the intellectual in the context of social theory. I took Sweet's use of 'intellectual' to be riffing on Gramsci, who saw the role of the intellectual as constitutive of hegemonic political orders. Gramsci argued Italian intellectuals produced a false consciousness in the Italian proletariat that suppressed their (true) revolutionary consciousness. Sweet positions Domingos as a counter intellectual to the hegemonies of Dahomey and Portuguese Brazil, whose performance of spiritual healing serves as a powerful (and therefore dangerous) form of politics critical of the prevailing orders. This is how Domingos’ success at forging a large kin group can be described as his “genius;” every new initiate represents a subversion of Catholicism and Portuguese colonialism. This also goes a way to answering how Sweet can claim Domingos’ actions threatened the institutions of slavery while he helped to restore slaves’ productivity. The answer would seem to be that as Domingos ‘helps’ the slave masters, he increases his own renown and secures his reputation as having access to a form of power that threatens Dahomey and Portugal enough to get him twice exiled.
February 12, 2019
Required for Atlantic World 15th-19th century graduate reading seminar, Ph.D.
March 18, 2025
Read for my Early Latin American History Class! This was such a wonderful read and one of the best historical monographs I've been assigned in a history class. I also loved the Inquisition Trial we had in class, it definitely helped me process the ideas of the book in an easier way!
Read
February 16, 2013909.0496 S9746 2011
November 19, 2014
It was very interesting. I have never read the biography of a slave before and this one led a very unusual life.
November 26, 2021
For class.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews