The Sensorial Histories of the Early Modern Caribbean

This paper proposes a novel approach to our understanding of sensing and being in the early modern Atlantic world. When labeled as cultural or political tropes, seventeenth century Caribbean black ritual practitioners’ definitions of how the world can be sensed appear only as “soft” reactions to the “hardness” of “real” material explanations—those related to (modern western) economic, demographic, biomedical and scientific analyses of human bodies and their environments. The lives of early modern Caribbean communities, however, did not uniquely obey the “realities” described under the sensual limits described on modern, biomedically-based histories of diseases in the region. Not only did early modern Caribbean people interpret the physical realm they inhabited differently, but they also felt and inhabited it differently.

Early modern black Caribbean ritual practitioners, this paper argues, shaped novel ways of sensing the early modern Caribbean world. In the absence of common linguistic and cultural grounds, black Caribbean ritual practitioners became involved in a novel sensorial imbrication of Atlantic threads of all origins. It was through this essential process that Caribbean Mohanes fashioned routes for making perceivable the spiritual and social landscapes of their new land. In doing so, they defined the broad sensorial boundaries of the natural world in which the novel Caribbean bodily cultures of the seventeenth century could ensue. Early modern black bodies and how they felt the world—not the least because of their sheer numbers—were the existential and cognitive basis bedrock of early modern Caribbean cultures of knowing the world.