Other(ed) powers: methodologies and scholarship on obeah and other magical practices

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Brant M. Torres is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Francisco where he teaches American literature from the colonial period through the 20th century. His current book manuscript, Occult Feelings: Queer Affects, Strange Objects, and Esotericism in Nineteenth-Century America illustrates how the literary use of occult language, images, and philosophies encouraged the exploration of new forms of erotic relation in nineteenth-century America.

Notes

1. For more, see Diana Paton's excellent website “Obeah Histories,” which contains original documents and their transcriptions, case histories, and other resources for work on obeah.

2. See, http://obeahhistories.org/1760-jamaica-law/.

The law was the Jamaican planters’ response to the biggest slave rebellion that took place in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean, which came to be known as Tacky’s rebellion. The rebellion began at Easter 1760, when 150 enslaved people attacked the fort at Port Maria in the parish of Saint Mary. Their leader Tacky, an enslaved man from the Gold Coast (today's Ghana), gave the rebellion its name.

3. See also Long, History of Jamaica, http://obeahhistories.org/1760-jamaica-law/.

4. See “An Act to Remedy the Evils Arising from Irregular Assemblies of Slaves.”

5. I’m taking this language from Shakespeare's The Tempest, a play that Monique Allewaert and James H. Sweet both use as an epigraph to their studies.

6. Bilby and Handler, Enacting Power, xiii.

7. For example, Sandra Lauderdale Graham's critiques Sweet's speculative work when she argues:

The sources for much of what he [Sweet] wants to know are either fragmented or circumstantial. But he is intrepid in evaluating and interpreting difficult sources. So I am puzzled when, at the end of the book, he veers away from the historian's firm grounding in the sources, however problematic, into a realm of imagined symbol and metaphor that is more appropriate to the writing of fiction. (See Lauderdale Graham “Domingos Álvares”)

8. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, 4. Subsequent reference to the text will appear in textual parentheses.

9. Paton and Forde, Obeah and Other Powers, 5. Subsequent reference to the text will appear in textual parentheses.

10. See, McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion.

11. Allewaert, Ariel's Ecology, 2.

12. Allewaert, Ariel's Ecology, 7.