Congratulations to Nana Osei Quarshie, whose “Spiritual Pawning: “Mad Slaves” and Mental Healing in Atlantic-Era West Africa” (CSSH 65-3, 2023) was just awarded Honorable Mention for the 2024 James L. Clifford Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies! The committee had the following praise for the essay:
In “Spiritual Pawning,” Nana Osei Quarshie broadens the field of eighteenth-century studies with an ambitious research agenda that draws on the Ga shrines of Accra to show how West African spaces of mental healing were used to produced subjects of European enslavement. Quarshie’s illuminating and wide-ranging article insightfully situates mental health as a central concern of the Transatlantic slave trade.
