Expanding the colonial archive

ABSTRACT

Reflecting on the insights the churches Black brotherhoods built in colonial Brazil have to offer about the patrons' lives and subjectivities, this brief provocation invites to think the colonial archive beyond the static document.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Catholicism
• brotherhood/confraternity/imandade
• religious art and architecture
• archive

Notes

1 Archivo General de la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona, Spain (AGCA), R. 3298, Ordenanzas de la cofradía de los cristianos negros de Barcelona, 1455; AGCA, R. 3512, Fundación de la cofradía de los negros libertos de la ciudad de Valencia, 1472, fs. 217–18; Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal, Compromisso da Irmandade do Rosário dos Homens Pretos, Lisbon, 1565, MS 150; Institución Colombina, Seville, Spain, Reglas de la cofradía de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, Seville, 1558, Sección Justicia, Serie Hermandades y Cofradías, 94. Seville's confraternity dates back to the end of the fourteenth century (Moreno 1997); and Afro-Lisboetas were admitted into Lisbon's Rosary brotherhoods beginning in the 1460s (Fonseca 2016).

2 It is believed that the first Black confraternity in the Americas was founded in Santo Domingo in the early decades of the sixteenth century; see Apodaca 2022.

3 In the case of Peru, most of these sources emerged from litigation in the ecclesiastical tribunal of Lima; see, e.g., Gómez 2019; Walker 2015.

4 Further investigation is required on my part on how the White irmãos took over the church, as happened in Seville in the eighteenth century, when many Afro-Brazilian brotherhoods still administer their own churches.

5 On minkisi, see Martínez-Ruiz 2013, esp. 149–82.

6 On these questions, see also my Sovereign joy (2022).