Candice Goucher
Washington State University
USA
Performing Iron in the Black Atlantic World
The act of making and forging iron in the Black Atlantic world conveys the historical
ambiguity of contradictory forces at play. The great Atlantic system produced
knowledge and goods, even as it consumed vast resources and enslaved lives. African
ironworkers, who welded and forged the shackles of captives, also wrought the
implements of resistance and hammered the tools for their survival. No other material
captures this “terrible ambivalence” as does iron, leading its metallurgy to be termed by
the historian Cyril Stanley Smith as a “fully human experience.” The ritual embodiment
of iron was an essential component of African technology transfer. The technological
performance of iron involved empowering relationships between the collective past and
individual agency. Its memory in the Atlantic resided on land and at sea, captured in
static and unyielding iron objects, as well as the performed dances of carnival and
African-derived religion that placed the resistance into motion.
This paper will explore the transfer of African iron technology, its performance,
rituals, and beliefs to the Caribbean. The memory of iron – as knowledge – also resides
in objects. Both commodities and practices were displayed, translated, and performed. The ownership and meaning of goods and skills also depended on the spaces where they were made and used, including onboard ships. Further excavation and study of iron objects, when understood as active participants in the conceptualization of ritual and community building, can be used to discern the mechanisms by which Africans remembered iron and recreated the contexts for individual empowerment and collective survival in the Black Atlantic. Based on the remnants of archival, ethnographic, andarchaeological evidence, the associated meanings of iron include the expression of cultural cognition or “ritual” that culminates in and is trapped by the object and“performed” by the larger community.
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