Please join the art department and Professor J. Lorand Matory, Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University for the lecture, BDSM as an Afro-Atlantic Religion.

Through a comparison among sacred arts of West African Yoruba Religion, Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santería Ocha, Haitian Vodou, and White American BDSM, Matory will explore intimate and spiritual forms of ambivalence about the Enlightenment ideals of individuality and political equality in the republics of the Atlantic perimeter, with implications for our understanding of our current populist authoritarian moment.

Matory directs the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project. From 2009 until 2015, he directed the University’s Center for African and African American Research.

A globally recognized expert on black Atlantic religion and arts, Matory conducts field research in Brazil, Nigeria, Benin Republic, Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica and the United States.

Choice magazine named his Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion an outstanding book of the year in 1994, and his Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé received the Herskovits Prize for the best book of 2005 from the African Studies Association. In 2013, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, a lifetime achievement award that is one of Europe’s highest academic distinctions.

This event is presented with support from the Art History Baldwin Endowment and Allen Memorial Art Museum.