James H. Sweet Summary

A haunting narrative, James H. Sweet’s micro-history of the life and times of Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World is a stellar work central to understanding African agency in the eighteenth-century from a bottom up perspective. Traditional historiographies mostly reflect the experiences of the white social and mobile elite consequently, a top down perspective. However, Sweet focuses on the view from below the elite, and chronicles the life of a native African male slave, Domingos Álavrez, between the tumultuous years of 1730 and 1750 consequently, revealing the impact and influences African culture imprinted on the Atlantic world and the America’s.
Sweet enlists an impressive wealth of resources to build a foundation for his complex arguments. Specifically,
Domingo’s forced migration from the Bight of Benin to the America’s, via the middle passage, his brief stay on a plantation in Pernambuco, Brazil; and his experiences in Rio de Janeiro until his final exile in Portugal, all originated and culminated due to his suggested experience as a Vudon priest and suspicions of dark magic or witchcraft. Through this work Sweet proves that like religion, culture, and belief is not static, it’s dynamic, and vibrant and changes over time. It is also clear that co-mingling of Traditional African Religion and Catholicism provided advantages for Domingo’s lifestyle. Moreover, by adapting Catholicism into the beliefs of his vudon beliefs and practices, Domingos manipulated his owner’s and clients, by revealing psychological, political and societal ills and creating a spiritual sense of fear. For example, his use of Gbo to delay a slave ship, and his possession and alleged cure of Leonor de Oliveira, was this evidence of healing practices and cures or an illusion Álvarez created to protest the social and political angst of his new