Print Publications by James P Padilioni Jr
U.S. Catholic Historian, 2020
The supernaturalism associated with San Martín de Porres places him at the crossroads of institut... more The supernaturalism associated with San Martín de Porres places him at the crossroads of institutional Catholicism and the Vodú of the Dominican Republic and its Miami, Florida migrant community. Despite Martín's official May 6, 1962 canonization as an emblem for the Second Vatican Council's updated sensibilities on racial and social justice, Martín's racial heritage and his mystic associations positioned Martín as an emergent folk saint (misterio) for practitioners of Vodú in the 1960s. This uptick of San Martín de Porres "sightings" within Dominican folk religion reveals the dialogic reformations of Dominicanidad (Dominican national-religious identity) in consequence of the momentous changes wrought by the 1960s. The assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo (1961), the ensuing Dominican Civil War and U.S. occupation (1962–1965), and the abolishment of the U.S.'s national-origins quota system (1965) each worked in tandem to create a mass-exodus of Dominicans to the United States. Within the Church, the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Medellín Conference (1968), and their approach to popular religion and liberation theology further transformed Dominican identity and experience. This study is situated in the Archdiocese of Miami, Florida, a geographic and cultural hub for the Afro-Catholic diaspora. There Dominican Vodú spiritism is a practice that illustrates the sacred and transnational dimensions of Hispaniolan historical experience as worked out between devotees and the agentive personalities of their misterios.
Conference Presentations by James P Padilioni Jr
Presents a model of Diaspora as a network harnessed by Afro-descendants to mobilize symbolic-mate... more Presents a model of Diaspora as a network harnessed by Afro-descendants to mobilize symbolic-material resources, drawn from three case studies analyzing Martin de Porres' iconography and ritual performances as both a historical figure and a figure of repetition within Black Diasporic Cultures
This talk focuses on the relation of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Martin de Porres throughout the ... more This talk focuses on the relation of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Martin de Porres throughout the long twentieth century at Our Lady of Lourdes, Atlanta’s oldest Catholic congregation serving the African-American community. Founded in 1912, OLL is located a short walk down the street from Ebenezer Baptist Church and is today located within the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. During the 1950s, OLL installed a 7’ tall statue of Martin de Porres, a seventeenth-century Afro-Peruvian friar whose case for sainthood culminated in 1962 when Pope John XXIII canonized him as the universal patron of social justice. Members of OLL founded the St. Martin Human Relations Council in 1965, participating in anti-police brutality demonstrations following the “Bloody Sunday” incident in Selma, AL and coordinating an in-home dialog program to foster mutual understanding around issues of race. From a combination of archival records and ethnographic fieldwork, Padilioni teases out the ways that congregants at OLL entangled the two Martins together in their mobilizations for social and racial justice, as well as the ways OLL transformed Martin Luther King, Jr. into a “folk saint of Black History” by elaborating his memory through oral history apocrypha and hagiographic practices.
This lecture examines the social media platforms and presentation of Sancista Brujo Luis, a Bosto... more This lecture examines the social media platforms and presentation of Sancista Brujo Luis, a Boston-based sanse and espiritismo practitioner/healer, to demonstrate how Luis uses these Afro-Latin-Caribbean practices both to elaborate the past through the continued inheritance of patron saints and spiritual guides from ancestors while diffusing such spiritual knowledges through engaging 21st century cybernetic technologies on platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
This session takes up the issue of pedagogical dissent by way of... more This session takes up the issue of pedagogical dissent by way of Blackness, situating the multiple locations, material productions, affective registers, and transmission methods harnessed by Black peoples as they labor to generate and diffuse knowledge. Each of the papers here reveals Black pedagogy as a repertoire of critical modes of thought, embodied gestures, and aesthetic performances, elaborated over, under, and within five centuries of white supremacy. Black knowledge marks the site of transgression, a persistent and resistant understanding of the world that exceeds the clean categories and discrete boundaries of racial capitalism. While traditional Eurocentric models of instruction privilege the site of the classroom, Black pedagogy displaces this notion by converting the everyday into a theater, and the theater into a classroom. Where Eurocentrism upholds the linear authority of the teacher-student relationship, Black instruction flourishes within the coils of intimacy. Rational modes of truth foreground the archive of documented records, but Black instruction is felt in the body, lived on the street, and seen in nighttime visions. Black curriculum percolates with a vibrant urgency and stands in the gap between life and death, imparting the very lessons that teach us how to survive and teach us how to thrive. This session, then, is a provocation to fructify our ways of teaching and instructing, to shake off the chains that bind us to received and authorized channels of Eurocentric education. Black pedagogy bequeaths us the audacity to envision a more ethical world and the responsibility to perform its choreographies, marking each step we take as an enactment of revolutionary love.
Brujería has long figured within Latinx communities as both a conso... more Brujería has long figured within Latinx communities as both a consort with the devil as well as a working knowledge of herbal, medicinal, and wellness practices oriented towards bodily, spiritual, and social healing. This panel highlights how diverse practitioners of brujería continue to restage and rearticulate brujería traditions through the technologies and geographies of late neoliberal capitalism. We argue that through their engagements with brujería, brujxs are able to access and generate [social] powers and thus conjure new worlds structured by the alternative socialities of brujería. The everyday practices of the brujxs discussed on this panel aim to heal all manners of late capitalist dis/ease, and they enact this traditional spiritual and social work by reappropriating technologies, repurposing digital social media platforms, and rediscovering the commons within the gentrifying city. Brujeria empowers its participants to conjure their worlds in ways that defy the logics and metaphysics of neoliberal modernity, allowing them the opportunity to imagine better futures. Barbara Sostaita's paper takes a look at las BRUJAS, a skateboarding and grassroots organizing collective comprised entirely of Latinx, indigenous, and Black women from New York, form and express community through femme skate dates at their local park, Anti-Prom and Sucia parties, and workshops on herbalism and brujería. Las BRUJAS develop ways to heal the injuries of inequality and imagine better futures, and as a result they conjure up the space for bearing witness to the pain, loss, and trauma of (post)colonial experiences.
Public Scholarship by James P Padilioni Jr
Cohost and Director of the Epistemic Unruliness interview stream.
Contributor to academic peer-reviewed blog
This episode features James, John, and newly-christened Always Already Correspondent M. Shadee Ma... more This episode features James, John, and newly-christened Always Already Correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou in a discussion drawn from a cross-reading of Calvin L. Warren’s “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope” (2015) with Frank Wilderson III’s “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” (2003). The spirited conversation covers the relation of (anti)Blackness to the constitution of the p/Political, its structuring logics of linear progressive time and rational civic engagement, and how the Political ultimately fails to achieve emancipation. We interrogate whether Western metaphysics is constitutively anti-black (spoiler alert: yes), and position Black Nihilism alongside Afropessimism, Black Optimism, and Afro-Futurism (all with their due™) to think through their various genealogies of production, the deeply affective labor asked of Black scholars who work on Black suffering. The episode concludes with an ode to the ever-needed wisdom of Black feminism. Is all hope lost? Take a listen and find out.
Video Presentations/Lectures by James P Padilioni Jr
This is a case study from the dissertation project "Black Ecstasies: Re/Membering the Diaspora Th... more This is a case study from the dissertation project "Black Ecstasies: Re/Membering the Diaspora Through St. Martin de Porres." This talk took place during April 2017 as part of the Speaker of the Month Series, hosted by African and African-American Studies at Elon University.
Martin de Porres (1579-1639) was born in Lima, Peru, the son of a Spanish colonial official and a freed African mother who had been previously enslaved in Panama. As a teenager Martin received training as a surgeon-barber before entering the Dominican convent and working in its apothecary, the base of his ministry for the poor African and indigenous communities. In 1671 the Catholic Church began recording eyewitness testimonies relating Martin's miraculous abilities including instantaneous healing and levitation. One witness, after seeing Martin suspended in the air while in the chapel, reportedly exclaimed "this mulatto is a trickster witch who goes flying with the Crucifix."
This talk takes up the appellation of "trickster witch" as an analytical category to reveal 1) the repertoire of herbalist-medicinal healing practices engaged by Afro-Peruvians in 17th century Lima, and 2) the power dynamics behind the construction of apparently-oppositional categories such as "witch" and "saint" and deciding who gets to name and define each. By developing a trickster hermeneutics, I read Martin's legends for evidences of multivoicing and signifyin(g) practices with layers of meaning that exceed simple "yes/no" binaries. I argue that Martin's herbalist healing epistemologies and his moments of dissimulated piety reveal a distinctive African orientation to his performance of Catholicism and demonstrate how grids of knowledge and truth figure as critical sites of resistance across the colonized terrains of the African Diaspora.
Syllabi and Course Abstracts by James P Padilioni Jr
This bibliography forms the source list for a Hip-Hop independent study I am working on with a st... more This bibliography forms the source list for a Hip-Hop independent study I am working on with a student over summer 2019. This study approaches Hip-Hop as a performative archive of critical Black folklore containing the sacred myths, cosmological expressions, ancestral rites, and nonlinear/otherwise-oriented vernacular time practices of Black Diaspora peoples in the global Americas. Additionally, this study traces the specific genre-genealogies of U.S.-based Hip-Hop alongside Jamaican sound system culture with its reggae, dub, and dancehall aesthetic production technologies.
From saint feast day processions and pilgrimages for Black Christ statues, to Junkunoo, Crop Over... more From saint feast day processions and pilgrimages for Black Christ statues, to Junkunoo, Crop Over, and other Caribbean festivals, religious holidays in Latin America are occasions for a celebration. This course focuses on the Caribbean Carnival Complex to reveal the ways this performance idiom forms mobile archives of history that testify to the accumulated forces of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism that continues to shape this region. In particular, we will focus upon ritual bodies and the potential contained in of choreography and kinesthesia to render bodies into instruments and devices of popular insurgency.
A survey of African American history from emancipation to the present: the challenge of emancipat... more A survey of African American history from emancipation to the present: the challenge of emancipation, Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, White terrorism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression and the transformation of the rural South, the civil rights movement, black power and white backlash, the rise of the prison-industrial complex, the development of hip-hop culture, and the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter. An examination of art, film, music, theater, and engagement with the digital humanities will supplement written primary and secondary sources.
This course interrogates the problem of Blackness in Latin America. While it is indisputable that... more This course interrogates the problem of Blackness in Latin America. While it is indisputable that Iberian America participated in the transatlantic slave trade, receiving some 90% of all Africans transported in the Middle Passage, locating Black identity amongst their descendants is more challenging. This is because the predominant identitarian notion of Blackness emerged historically in Anglo American contexts, particularly the United States. While idealized notions of White racial purity in the United States catalyzed an all-encompassing Black category as the site of Whiteness’ exclusion, idealizations in discourse and representation of mestizaje in Latin America have worked against the emergence of a strong racial identity in favor of national identity, masking the materiality of the Black presence within these national-cultural formations.
Nevertheless, there remains an effervescence of Black expression in Latin American political movements, visual arts, music, dance, and foodways, among others, that strongly index notions of Blackness as a political and social location, a set of orientations towards life, an ethical outlook, a shared historical trajectory, and performance aesthetics and stylistics.These articulate Blackness across the Americas and reveal the African Diaspora to be a differentiated whole.
Through approaching the problem of Blackness around several overarching themes in the historical development of Latin America, this class, then, locates Blackness by looking against the grain into the cracks and crevices of the myth of mestizaje. What alternative Black histories lie dormant within this myth? What does this erasure teach us about global formations of antiblackness? This class introduces students to methodologies of identity theory, performance studies, history, art history, ethnomusicology, critical race theory, and phenomenology to analyze the people, places, and events that are perceived and made intelligible through notions of Blackness in Latin America. Additionally, this class will attend to how notions of class, gender, and sexuality entangle with those of race and ethnicity in daily practices. Students will develop a critical understanding of the ways in which materiality grounds and circulates discourses of Blackness historically -- either in the body, in practice, or in notions of transcendent subjecthood/being.
This seminar explores ritual performances of the African Diaspora as a means of understanding the... more This seminar explores ritual performances of the African Diaspora as a means of understanding the regions, people, history, and social institutions that make up the Diaspora's footprint. What role has ritual performance and memory played in the construction of African America (North America, the Caribbean, and South America)? How does using episodes of ritual performance as a lens to study the African Diaspora challenge national boundaries and hegemonic narratives? And more generally, what can ritual performances tell us about people and their beliefs? By way of texts, discussions, audio recordings, and films, we will critically examine ritual performances and practices in a wide array of contexts, ranging from religious pilgrimages initiated during the colonial period to contemporary R&B music that articulate Africana memories. Because there are so many similar traditions widely spread throughout the Americas we will be tackling our subject matter geographically within the three distinct regions of the Diaspora. Unfortunately the topic is much too ample to cover everything, thus we will be focusing on broad categories of ritual performance.
Memories of the African Diaspora/Middle Passage are the central element of this course. Students will be exposed to the various ways in which the framing of history and the aesthetic expressions of Diasporic peoples emanate from experiences of slavery through their performances from all over the Americas. Therefore students will be expected to recognize and understand the basic historical development of slavery and ritual/performance studies terms in order to develop the skills to articulate Diasporic performance (broadly construed) verbally and in writing. Closely tracking alongside Diasporic performance is the emergence and articulation of Black identity. This class will consider race as a category of analysis, not as a “causal explanation” for phenomena, but rather as a crucial lens for revealing a specific form power relations take in historicized contexts . As race, understood as a vector of power and always denoting a social relationship, intersects and articulates with other power vectors, the categories of class, gender, and sexuality will also be used to highlight the specific form and function of race as appropriate.
This course investigates the trope of possession across the African Diaspora, first referring to ... more This course investigates the trope of possession across the African Diaspora, first referring to the logic of racial capitalism that commodified Black bodies, and secondly to scholarly discourses that situate possession, trance, ecstasy, and other bodily engagements with Spirit as hallmarks of Diasporic ritual phenomena. These include Vodou, Yoruba traditions (Candomblé, Lucumí, Shango Baptist), Catholic mysticism, Rastafari, Conjure, and Pentecostal-Charismatic-Apostolic Christianity. By way of ethnographic field reports, videos, films, and critical readings in race, kinesthetics, and phenomenology, students will discover how possession tropes reveal the workings of the White imaginary that perceived/s Black personhood as irrational and unstable, as well as develop an appreciation for the rich meaningfulness of Black Spirit ritual performances.
Teaching Exercises, Assignments, Activities by James P Padilioni Jr
Students have repeatedly asked me over the years why/how I came to Religious Studies, and so I fi... more Students have repeatedly asked me over the years why/how I came to Religious Studies, and so I finally sketched out the road of curiosities that I find animating my scholarly questions. Derived from Zora Neale Hurston's definition of culture as a discovery process in which folks "ask some questions of infinity about what is happening around their doorsteps," I have titled this quick sheet "Asking Infinity Some Questions" to pique the curiosities of students to set off and investigate the infinite worlds of knowledge that await them down the path of religious studies -- knowing from the outset that a search for infinity is, ultimately, inexhaustible, but this inability to find resolution is the very source of the mystery and fascination we find along the journey.
Ethnographic Fieldwork Video by James P Padilioni Jr
Documenting the evolution of the feast day procession for Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, July 16, 2015. ... more Documenting the evolution of the feast day procession for Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, July 16, 2015. Originally started by Italian immigrants in the 1880s, the procession today is an on-going and open-ended historic formation that has become a joint performance of both Italian and Haitian devotees. For more background, see Robert Orsi's book _The Madonna of 115th St_ and Elizabeth McAlister's article "The Madonna of 115th St. Revisited: Vodou and Haitian Catholicism in the Age of Transnationalism."
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Print Publications by James P Padilioni Jr
Conference Presentations by James P Padilioni Jr
Public Scholarship by James P Padilioni Jr
Video Presentations/Lectures by James P Padilioni Jr
Martin de Porres (1579-1639) was born in Lima, Peru, the son of a Spanish colonial official and a freed African mother who had been previously enslaved in Panama. As a teenager Martin received training as a surgeon-barber before entering the Dominican convent and working in its apothecary, the base of his ministry for the poor African and indigenous communities. In 1671 the Catholic Church began recording eyewitness testimonies relating Martin's miraculous abilities including instantaneous healing and levitation. One witness, after seeing Martin suspended in the air while in the chapel, reportedly exclaimed "this mulatto is a trickster witch who goes flying with the Crucifix."
This talk takes up the appellation of "trickster witch" as an analytical category to reveal 1) the repertoire of herbalist-medicinal healing practices engaged by Afro-Peruvians in 17th century Lima, and 2) the power dynamics behind the construction of apparently-oppositional categories such as "witch" and "saint" and deciding who gets to name and define each. By developing a trickster hermeneutics, I read Martin's legends for evidences of multivoicing and signifyin(g) practices with layers of meaning that exceed simple "yes/no" binaries. I argue that Martin's herbalist healing epistemologies and his moments of dissimulated piety reveal a distinctive African orientation to his performance of Catholicism and demonstrate how grids of knowledge and truth figure as critical sites of resistance across the colonized terrains of the African Diaspora.
Syllabi and Course Abstracts by James P Padilioni Jr
Nevertheless, there remains an effervescence of Black expression in Latin American political movements, visual arts, music, dance, and foodways, among others, that strongly index notions of Blackness as a political and social location, a set of orientations towards life, an ethical outlook, a shared historical trajectory, and performance aesthetics and stylistics.These articulate Blackness across the Americas and reveal the African Diaspora to be a differentiated whole.
Through approaching the problem of Blackness around several overarching themes in the historical development of Latin America, this class, then, locates Blackness by looking against the grain into the cracks and crevices of the myth of mestizaje. What alternative Black histories lie dormant within this myth? What does this erasure teach us about global formations of antiblackness? This class introduces students to methodologies of identity theory, performance studies, history, art history, ethnomusicology, critical race theory, and phenomenology to analyze the people, places, and events that are perceived and made intelligible through notions of Blackness in Latin America. Additionally, this class will attend to how notions of class, gender, and sexuality entangle with those of race and ethnicity in daily practices. Students will develop a critical understanding of the ways in which materiality grounds and circulates discourses of Blackness historically -- either in the body, in practice, or in notions of transcendent subjecthood/being.
Memories of the African Diaspora/Middle Passage are the central element of this course. Students will be exposed to the various ways in which the framing of history and the aesthetic expressions of Diasporic peoples emanate from experiences of slavery through their performances from all over the Americas. Therefore students will be expected to recognize and understand the basic historical development of slavery and ritual/performance studies terms in order to develop the skills to articulate Diasporic performance (broadly construed) verbally and in writing. Closely tracking alongside Diasporic performance is the emergence and articulation of Black identity. This class will consider race as a category of analysis, not as a “causal explanation” for phenomena, but rather as a crucial lens for revealing a specific form power relations take in historicized contexts . As race, understood as a vector of power and always denoting a social relationship, intersects and articulates with other power vectors, the categories of class, gender, and sexuality will also be used to highlight the specific form and function of race as appropriate.
Teaching Exercises, Assignments, Activities by James P Padilioni Jr
Ethnographic Fieldwork Video by James P Padilioni Jr
Martin de Porres (1579-1639) was born in Lima, Peru, the son of a Spanish colonial official and a freed African mother who had been previously enslaved in Panama. As a teenager Martin received training as a surgeon-barber before entering the Dominican convent and working in its apothecary, the base of his ministry for the poor African and indigenous communities. In 1671 the Catholic Church began recording eyewitness testimonies relating Martin's miraculous abilities including instantaneous healing and levitation. One witness, after seeing Martin suspended in the air while in the chapel, reportedly exclaimed "this mulatto is a trickster witch who goes flying with the Crucifix."
This talk takes up the appellation of "trickster witch" as an analytical category to reveal 1) the repertoire of herbalist-medicinal healing practices engaged by Afro-Peruvians in 17th century Lima, and 2) the power dynamics behind the construction of apparently-oppositional categories such as "witch" and "saint" and deciding who gets to name and define each. By developing a trickster hermeneutics, I read Martin's legends for evidences of multivoicing and signifyin(g) practices with layers of meaning that exceed simple "yes/no" binaries. I argue that Martin's herbalist healing epistemologies and his moments of dissimulated piety reveal a distinctive African orientation to his performance of Catholicism and demonstrate how grids of knowledge and truth figure as critical sites of resistance across the colonized terrains of the African Diaspora.
Nevertheless, there remains an effervescence of Black expression in Latin American political movements, visual arts, music, dance, and foodways, among others, that strongly index notions of Blackness as a political and social location, a set of orientations towards life, an ethical outlook, a shared historical trajectory, and performance aesthetics and stylistics.These articulate Blackness across the Americas and reveal the African Diaspora to be a differentiated whole.
Through approaching the problem of Blackness around several overarching themes in the historical development of Latin America, this class, then, locates Blackness by looking against the grain into the cracks and crevices of the myth of mestizaje. What alternative Black histories lie dormant within this myth? What does this erasure teach us about global formations of antiblackness? This class introduces students to methodologies of identity theory, performance studies, history, art history, ethnomusicology, critical race theory, and phenomenology to analyze the people, places, and events that are perceived and made intelligible through notions of Blackness in Latin America. Additionally, this class will attend to how notions of class, gender, and sexuality entangle with those of race and ethnicity in daily practices. Students will develop a critical understanding of the ways in which materiality grounds and circulates discourses of Blackness historically -- either in the body, in practice, or in notions of transcendent subjecthood/being.
Memories of the African Diaspora/Middle Passage are the central element of this course. Students will be exposed to the various ways in which the framing of history and the aesthetic expressions of Diasporic peoples emanate from experiences of slavery through their performances from all over the Americas. Therefore students will be expected to recognize and understand the basic historical development of slavery and ritual/performance studies terms in order to develop the skills to articulate Diasporic performance (broadly construed) verbally and in writing. Closely tracking alongside Diasporic performance is the emergence and articulation of Black identity. This class will consider race as a category of analysis, not as a “causal explanation” for phenomena, but rather as a crucial lens for revealing a specific form power relations take in historicized contexts . As race, understood as a vector of power and always denoting a social relationship, intersects and articulates with other power vectors, the categories of class, gender, and sexuality will also be used to highlight the specific form and function of race as appropriate.
I contend that the performative (re)locations of Martin create sites of diasporan memory, bridging disjunct histories and geographies emanating from Africa across the Americas. Mapping Martin de Porres devotions from the Peruvian Pacific, through the Caribbean, and into contemporary Atlanta, this (re)search offers a cartographic vision to unsettle the metonymic imagining of diaspora bounded within the Black Atlantic, while revealing the porous delineations between the United States and Latin America.
This paper makes the contention that the life and memory of St. Martin de Porres represents a point of unification among the diversity and disparate memories of the African Diaspora described as the black radical tradition by scholars such as Cedric Robinson and Fred Moten. The narratives and themes that constellate around the figure of St. Martin de Porres center around the significance of black skin. The black body in Colonial Lima lay suspended between overlapping spheres of sovereignty detailed in civil and ecclesiastical law that, at stress points, worked both to reinforce and constitute each other. The dual institutions of Spanish slavery and casta hierarchies catalogued and assigned economic, social, and cultural value to the black body along spectrums of ranging casta hues and varying degrees of subjection and subjecthood. A textured study of the life of St. Martin de Porres reveals the strategies and tactics of the black dialectic struggle for life that emerged within modernity in dialog with developing technologies of black bodily dominion described by Achille Mbembe as necropolitics, or the sovereign power to put a person to death. Additionally, reading Martin's story through Frantz Fanon's theory of epidermalization will sketch a more detailed picture of the significance of skin color in Baroque Lima, its relevance in the construction of the self, and provide a richer and nuanced context for the remarkable fame and public veneration heaped upon Martin by his contemporary society continuing among his cult into the present.
In particular, this research will uncover a semiotics of abolitionism, and will view abolitionist discourse as not limited to the written word, but exemplified in aesthetic forms such as poems and novels, visual representations such as prints and broadsides, and ephemera. Beginning chronologically with Adam Smith as a generative site of abolitionist ideology, a robust analytical interplay between ideology and materiality will be in focus during this investigation born out of the methodological impulse that material culture and aesthetic sources figure as useful sites for historical inquiry due to the implicit ideologies standing behind the form of their materialization and didactic function within society to “do ‘social work.’” Evidence of the Anti-Saccharine and Free Produce Movements exists in divergent sources located far from locations of explicit ideological discourse (treatises, polemics, etc.), and while these other forms will be discussed here, it will be to draw a richer field of reference for the semiotics of abolitionist discourse.