During vivid rituals for a family of spirits called Mama Tchamba Ewe people in Togo produce living histories of domestic slavery. By inviting the spirits of enslaved ancestors to control their bodies, domestic spaces, and shrines, ritual specialists connect themselves to histories of trade and forced migration that are otherwise submerged in fractured memories. Since ritual practitioners remember the enslaved as practicing Muslims captured in northern Togo, performers exaggerate Muslim aesthetics as they dance adorned with fez hats and sparkling head ties understood to come from “the North.” I argue that devotees use ritual performances to map the spectral legacies, or afterlives, of slavery onto contemporary social relations.

This project will examine ways that women navigate issues of global social justice including poverty, sex work, education, and exploitation through creative tactics and by mobilizing arts practices as they display and reframe embodied histories. My work highlights the choreographic, creative, and political choices of women ritual specialists as they select specific histories and gestures through which to build individual and collective identities. Mama Tchamba devotees in particular present themselves as surrogates for enslaved persons in ways both generative and problematic, strategically choosing to identify with their northern, Muslim, enslaved ancestors rather than their historically wealthy, slaveholding forebearers. This research focuses on ways non-elite women transmit unwritten family histories of domestic slavery using their bodies as catalysts for collectively remembering narratives of enslavement as a politicized form of social critique.