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Abstract
In conjunction with this special issue of Atlantic Studies, the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) – developed at Northeastern University and available at ecdaproject.org – has created a collaborative archival project, “Obeah and the Caribbean.” This project consists, in part, of a digital exhibit of original obeah texts including a number of the primary sources that are discussed throughout the articles in this volume of Atlantic Studies. The ECDA is designed to serve not only as a repository but also as a digital commons and laboratory space for researchers and students interested in the early Caribbean: users of the site can curate, annotate, and discuss early Caribbean materials that are included in the archive. We invite readers of this issue to further engage and experiment with primary sources and to collaborate with other scholars by way of this exhibit and the digital workspace of the ECDA + CoLab. In the brief essay below, we discuss some of the core intellectual issues that inform the ECDA and our project on obeah.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributors
Nicole N. Aljoe is an associate professor in the department of English at Northeastern University and the author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709–1838 (Palgrave, 2011). Her research and teaching focus on the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic.
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is a professor of English at Northeastern University and the Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. She is the author, most recently, of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Duke University Press, 2014).
Benjamin J. Doyle is a doctoral student in English at Northeastern University. His research focuses on early transatlantic print and the digital humanities.
Elizabeth Hopwood is a doctoral student in English at Northeastern University. Her research interests include nineteenth-century Atlantic literature and foodways.
Notes
1. For examples, see http://obeahhistories.org/three-fingered-jack/.
2. Paton, “Histories of Three-Fingered Jack: A Bibliography by Diana Paton.”
3. The editors of this special issue – Toni Wall Jaudon and Kelly Wisecup – have both written insightfully about the nature of the knowledge crisis that obeah engenders. Wisecup notes that, “Colonists’ encounters with obeah and their descriptions of those encounters disrupted their own epistemological and ontological categories, which separated natural and supernatural phenomenon and posited definitive boundaries between states of life and death” (“Knowing Obeah,” 406). Jaudon, in turn, points out that “obeah practitioners seem[ed] to live at once within the space of the colony and, somehow, beyond it … It is [the] assumption of a stable, shared common ground that obeah contested for colonial authorities” (“Obeah’s Sensations,” 729). See also Stephan Palmié, “Other Powers.”
4. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 145.
5. The ECDA is freely available to all interested publics. The “Obeah and Atlantic Studies” exhibit can be found at http://ecdaproject.org/obeahandatlanticstudies. Note that this is a work in progress and may change shape considerably over time. We describe its current instantiation in this essay. The ECDA homepage is available at: http://ecdaproject.org. Information on becoming an ECDA + CoLab scholar is available at http://ecdaproject.org/commons/.
6. Gikandi, “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,” 92.
7. Gikandi, “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,”, 84.
8. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 3.
9. Gikandi, “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,” 94.
10. Wisecup, “Knowing Obeah,” 408.
11. Aljoe, Creole Testimonies.
12. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 12–13.
13. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,”, 12.
14. Gikandi, “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,” 92.