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An archival abscess subtly warps the pages of a manuscript held at the Torre do Tombo National Archive in Lisbon, Portugal (Fig. 1). In 1704, agents of the Portuguese Inquisition sewed this object into the binding of the trial papers of Jacques Viegas, an enslaved “natural of Ouidah” about twenty years old.1 Jacques had entered the Holy Office in June of that year, desperate to confess the sins that burdened him. Reaching into the cuff of his pant leg, he removed this small green fabric pouch and held it up for inquisitors to see.2 It was because of this object, he stated, that demons attacked him, grabbing his limbs as he slept. Over the next four months, inquisitors interrogated Jacques about the object's origins, construction, and use. Jacques explained that he acquired it from Manoel, another black man in Lisbon, who manufactured pouches that could protect their wearers from knife wounds, gunshots, and malevolent forces. Through an opened seam in the side, one can still glimpse the pouch's contents: black hairs, seeds, cotton, and a folded piece of paper (Fig. 2). Manoel always filled his pouches with such empowered substances, later activating their potential through ritual incantations. The secrecy of their manufacture, however, contrasted to the spectacular public performances that confirmed their efficacy. In one case, Manoel put on one of his pouches and plunged a sword into his chest “with great force; but it did not hurt him, only bending the sword.”3 This proved to Jacques that it was no ordinary object: It was mandinga. To inquisitors, this term confirmed Jacques's pact with the Devil. And so they sentenced him to an auto-da-fé, a public flogging, and three years of exile to southern Portugal.4 But while Jacques would never return to Lisbon, this object remains there, preserved inside the decaying pages used to imprison it and its owner.Between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, apotropaic objects called mandingas circulated in places like Madeira, Cape Verde, Brazil, Angola, and Portugal. These diverse regions were bound together by the governance of the Portuguese Empire and the movements of African ideas generated through the transatlantic slave trade, a system of transcultural destructions, flows, and reinventions scholars have come to call the black Atlantic world (Gilroy 1993; Matory 2005). Almost all information about these objects, including the only extant mandingas from this period, survives in the trial records of the Portuguese Inquisition.5 While these documents emerge from Inquisitorial efforts to both suppress and demonize the practice, Inquisitorial records also position mandingas as rich, and heretofore largely unexamined, archives of Africans’ experiences in the early modern black Atlantic.For art historians, mandingas' forms and uses present a series of definitional problems. Strictly speaking, mandinga described not an object's form, but its function. While mandingas commonly protected their owners from violence, some could intervene in sexual and romantic relationships, or even allow enslaved persons to escape the oversight of their masters.6 And while their forms could vary widely, a mandinga was most often a fabric pouch (bolsa) into which empowering substances were placed. Used across all racial and social classes, these bolsas de mandinga were primarily produced and disseminated by enslaved Africans whose biographies crossed central and western Africa, Brazil, and often Portugal; Africans who—like the objects they made and disseminated along the way—spent their lives navigating, fighting, and reinterpreting a range of conflicting, even contradictory, visual and ritual practices.To date, mandinga pouches have largely eluded scholarly scrutiny. Historians, who have often considered mandingas as symptomatic of colonial power relations (Sansi 2011; Souza 2003; Sweet 2003) or African resistance to slavery (Harding 2003), tend to characterize their contents as difficult-to-interpret transculturations or as efforts to mask or dialogue indigenous African beliefs with foreign influences (Lahon 2004; Calainho 2008; Santos 2008). Meanwhile, Amy J. Buono notes that art historians “have largely ignored the mandinga pouches, in which the more ‘artistic’ elements are hidden from view inside the pouch itself” (2015: 25–26). Both of these perspectives parallel mandingas' reception in Portuguese Inquisition records, where declarations of insignificance, indecipherability, and diabolism accompany descriptions of the pouches’ contents. That parallel makes dedicated art historical studies of mandinga pouches all the more pressing.In this essay, I argue that mandingas' seeming indecipherability and visual banality are not just matters of current scholarly debate, but were their core aesthetic strategies. Principles of visual indeterminacy, occlusion, and assemblage governed the mandinga pouches’ production as a strategic innovation in response to systemic violence and ever-shifting cultural boundaries. By hiding their internal contents, mandinga-makers (mandingueiros) experimented with an ever-changing assemblage of carefully chosen activating substances. Paralleling their makers’ experience of dislocation and recontextualization, bolsas de mandinga contained an array of contents that interrogate cultural boundaries, religious orthodoxies, and artistic hierarchies. Their form, too, was strategic: small pouches blended in with preexisting amulets across central and western Africa as well as Christian Europe. Their small size and light weight also facilitated transfer from person to person. In this way, mandinga pouches embody a mobile version of what Cécile Fromont has termed a “space of correlation,” where their makers explored cultural transformation and sociopolitical efficacy away from the oversight of masters, inquisitors, and other elites (Fromont 2014: 70). In what follows, I analyze the classification, construction, and use of select mandinga pouches in order to investigate the contributions they make to the study of African diasporic visual cultures. In so doing, I take as a conceptual thread the term “survival.” While this term alludes to Melville Herskovits's (1958) foundational and often-critiqued searches for essentialized African cultural “survivals” in the Americas, here I intend the term to trace mandingas' multiple, even contradictory, lines of cultural influence as representative of their makers’ search for safety and protection in a violent world.By the mid-eighteenth century, people across the African-Portuguese world used mandinga—the Portuguese rendering of Mandinka or Mande—to characterize any object that could help protect its wearer from knife wounds, bullets, and malevolent forces. It is not clear exactly how or why this African ethnonym came to refer to apotropaic objects not sanctioned by the Catholic Church. However, a series of early seventeenth century Portuguese-language descriptions of the Upper Guinea Coast associated Mandinka Muslims with the use of leather amulets filled with orations written in Arabic (Monod, Mauny, and de Mota 1951: 9). While often chalked up to superstition and idolatry (Guerreiro 1930: 403), particularly concerning for the chroniclers was the pouches’ role in religious conversion between Islam and local practices. A 1606 account by Jesuit priest Balthazar Barreira describes how Mandinka Muslims in present-day Guinea-Bissau placed Qur'anic papers into leather pouches, then disseminated the amulets to spread Islam.7 And in 1625, the Cape Verdean traveler André Donelha reported how Mandinka Muslim priests (bixirins) spread “the cursed sect of Mohammed” in Guinean seaports by selling “fetishes in the form of ram's horns and amulets and sheets of paper with writing on them” (Mota and Hair 1977: 161). Although, two centuries after Donelha, a similar confluence of these pouch-amulets, horns, and local talismans plays out the bodies of subjects depicted in Amédée Tardieu's of (Fig. the pouches’ for both Islam in that it in here ram's horns from local in the of foreign Portuguese particularly what they as Christian were into the Donelha reported that he was to his the Mandinka in a with amulets of his his But explained that his was a to with his Muslim whose was to his Donelha and in and from his out a of (Mota and Hair 1977: While Donelha, his can also as an of religious in order to to religious to this the of in of and had always a form of which for they only Christian in the of the while in the they were 1). 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potential to substances and on the bodies of and to still do so even as inquisitors or opened up and their contents. 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