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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.
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
