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

320 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 17 illus., 5 maps, 4 tables, notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN 978-0-8078-3449-7

Published: February 2011

Paper

ISBN 978-1-4696-0975-1

Available: August 2013

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

By James H. Sweet

Awards & Distinctions

2012 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

2011 James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History, American Historical Association

2011 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

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.

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.

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

"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 Parés, Universidade Federal da Bahia