“The Wilderness Within”: African Diasporic Religion in New Granada, 1690-1790

This dissertation examines African diasporic religions in New Granada in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, it argues for the constitutive role of black mobility, space, and state institutions in their creation and circulation. Africans and their descendants—whether black or of mixed African, indigenous, and European heritages—had a deep engagement with Catholicism and its material culture in New Granada. There were significant common experience and variations in African-descended experience of the religious world and interactions with colonial institutions, shaped by ethnicity, gender, geography, mode of labour, and place of birth. This dissertation challenges the notion of separate histories of Caribbean and Pacific African-descended communities in Colombia through an examination of the movement of black bodies, religious knowledges, and ritual objects. It examines African diasporic religious creations situated within their social contexts, as well as the church and state’s criminalization of black ritual, medicine, and family life. New Granada was a space where culture and capital flowed between different regimes of slavery and systems of free labour. Diverse everyday epistemologies and material objects circulated among people of African descent across eighteenth-century New Granada within a shared world, one created by the power structures of the Catholic church, the colonial state, and the institution of slavery. This dissertation is based on a close reading of archival fragments from civil and criminal trials, government correspondence, and ecclesiastical records from collections in Colombia, Spain, and the United States. It seeks to challenge prevailing chronologies of African diaspora populations, moving away from political periodizations, and is framed around black experience—with the years 1690 and 1790 coming soon after fundamentally different campaigns of conquest of free communities of colour.Ph.D.2021-07-19 00:00:0