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Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume I, Obeah

Africans in the White Colonial Imagination

Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People

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Book

Pages: 280

Illustrations: 30 illustrations

Published: October 2022

Author: Tracey E. Hucks

Contributor: Dianne M. Stewart

Subjects
Religious Studies, African American Studies and Black Diaspora, Postcolonial and Colonial Studies

Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. Analyzing their entangled histories and systems of devotion, Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stewart articulate how these religions were criminalized during slavery and colonialism yet still demonstrated autonomous modes of expression and self-defense. In Volume I, Obeah, Hucks traces the history of African religious repression in colonial Trinidad through the late nineteenth century. Drawing on sources ranging from colonial records, laws, and legal transcripts to travel diaries, literary fiction, and written correspondence, she documents the persecution and violent penalization of African religious practices encoded under the legal classification of “obeah.” A cult of antiblack fixation emerged as white settlers defined themselves in opposition to Obeah, which they imagined as terrifying African witchcraft. These preoccupations revealed the fears that bound whites to one another. At the same time, persons accused of obeah sought legal vindication and marshaled their own spiritual and medicinal technologies to fortify the cultural heritages, religious identities, and life systems of African-diasporic communities in Trinidad.

Praise

“Boldly imagined and deeply researched, this brilliantly rendered and pathbreaking work is a welcome depiction of the richly complicated Black religious practices and history in Trinidad. It will stand as a foundational model of method and interpretation of an influential yet overlooked and oversimplified family of Africana religious thought and practices.” - Barbara Dianne Savage, author of Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion

“This meticulously researched book is a model of methodological scholarship. Its nuanced analyses of the slight traces of Obeah in the colonial archives of the Caribbean illuminate the marks of colonialism in religious and racial identities, as well as what escapes the grasp of colonial authorities. A truly extraordinary contribution!” - Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies, Harvard University

"On its own or in conjunction with its companionate volume II on Orisa, Obeah, Orisa, & Religious Identity in Trinidad is a welcome and valuable contribution to Africana religious studies, Atlantic studies, and Caribbean historiography." - Aisha Khan, JLACA

"A powerful, original contribution to this emerging literature. . . . [T]hese two volumes will be of great interest to scholars working in Caribbean and African Diaspora Religions."

- Alexander Rocklin, Nova Religio

“A model of rigorous scholarship that offers a thoughtful and nuanced reflection on the dynamic constructions of African religion and identity in Trinidad from the colonial period to the present.”

- Brendan Jamal Thornton, Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"Obeah, Orisha, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is a groundbreaking two-volume work by Drs. Tracey Hucks and Dianne Stewart [that] offer[s] new perspectives and challenge us to see through fresh lenses." - Adam Clark, Black Theology

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Tracey E. Hucks is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is the author of Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism.

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction to Volume I 1
1. The Formation of a Slave Colony: Race, Nation, and Identity 13
2. Let Them Hate So Long as They Fear: Obeah Trials and Social Cannibalism in Trinidad’s Early Slave Society 52
3. Obeah, Piety, and Poison in The Slave Son: Representations of African Religions in Trinidadian Colonial Literature 104
4. Marked in the Genuine African Way: Liberated Africans and Obeah Doctoring in Postslavery Trinidad 141
Afterword. C’est Vrai—It Is True 203
Notes 209
Bibliography 241
Index 253

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