Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Biographies

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

By James H. Sweet (NHC Fellow, 2006–07)

West African Vodun; Healers; Imperialism; Slave Trade; Intellectual History; Domingos Álvares

Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010

From the publisher’s description:

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.

Awards and Prizes
Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2011); James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History (2011); Frederick Douglass Book Prize (2012)
Subjects
History / Religion / Medicine / West African Vodun / Healers / Imperialism / Slave Trade / Intellectual History / Domingos Álvares /

Sweet, James H. (NHC Fellow, 2006–07). Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.