Mobile obeah: a response to “Obeah: knowledge, power, and writing in the early Atlantic World”

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tim Watson teaches in the English Department at the University of Miami. He is the author of Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and co-editor, with Candace Ward, of the 1827 novel Hamel, the Obeah Man, by Cynric Williams (Broadview Press, 2010).

Notes

1. Forde and Paton, “Introduction,” 26–27. They refer to Trouillot, Global Transformations, 7–28.

2. Faced with the illness, ascribed to obeah, of one enslaved man, Pickle, on one of his Jamaican plantations, Lewis writes, “I offered to christen him, and expel black Obeah by white, but in vain.” Lewis, Journal, 134.

3. Jaudon, “Obeah’s Sensations,” 715.

4. Ibid., 716.

5. James, “Segar Smoking Society.”

6. Joseph, Warner Arundell, 1:121.

7. “Woman of the Popo Country.”

8. Edwards, History, 116–117, emphases added.

9. I owe this idea of white West Indians projecting their own violence onto obeah men and women to Diana Paton, who develops it more fully in her book The Cultural Politics of Obeah.

10. Handler and Bilby, Enacting Power, 46; Paton, “Obeah Acts,” 4–5.

11. Quoted in Handler and Bilby, Enacting Power, 20.

12. Wisecup, “Knowing Obeah,” 408.

13. Ibid., 407.

14. Paton, “Response.”