At the end of the trade: obeah and black women in the colonial imaginary

Abstract

Between the prohibition of the British slave trade in 1807 and slavery’s end in 1833, colonial agents increasingly turned their attention toward enslaved women and the particular ways these women might have utilized obeah practices to resist the theft of both their productive and reproductive labor. Scholars have explored how obeah presented a diverse and often difficult challenge for colonial administration after Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760. However, the relationship between women and obeah has not prominently figured in these studies. This article considers three texts produced between 1788 and 1820 to understand how colonial writers articulated the threat posed by obeah and enslaved women to colonial regulation over this roughly 30-year period. Stephen Fuller’s 1788 “Woman of the Popo Country” traces a relationship between gender and obeah but imagines obeah’s intervention in the colony solely in terms of its effect on productive labor. Drawing on the depictions of obeah as a revolutionary discourse, William Earle’s 1801 abolitionist text Obi; or the History of Three-Finger'd Jack produces a sympathetic black, male hero who comes into being through rejecting the obeah practiced by his mother. Finally, Dr. James Thomson’s 1820 text A Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes as They Occur in the Island of Jamaica understands obeah as a dangerous practice, particularly as it impacts both the productive and reproductive labor of enslaved women. In this way, these texts increasingly imagined obeah as an active participant in the colonial construction of gender that positioned women within an evolving system of biopolitical control. Representations of women are an integral component of obeah fictions and have contributed to the negative legacies associated with reified versions of black womanhood.

Keywords:

• obeah
• nineteenth-century literatures
• Caribbean medicine
• enslaved women
• motherhood
• labor

In 1807 Britain abolished the slave trade. Twenty-six years later in 1833 the empire outlawed slavery completely. This relatively short period saw radical changes in the British Caribbean concerning the administration of African slaves and in particular attempts to regulate the black female body as a source of productive labor. Leading up to emancipation, the death rate for slaves exceeded their birth rate in the Caribbean. ¹ Diana Paton notes that “Although more than two million people were brought to the British Caribbean colonies through the period of the slave trade, only around 700,000 became free in 1834.” ² Prior to the banning of the trade, colonial administrators found it economically unsound to improve the living conditions of slaves, and in particular the condition of mothers and children. ³ Hence, suffering from overwork, malnourishment, and other poor living conditions, the average life span of a field hand was around five years. ⁴ In many cases the cost of raising a child born into slavery was higher than purchasing a slave from Africa. ⁵ In short, the cruel economy of human life in the colony ultimately made slave lives expendable. This changed with the outlawing of the trade in 1807. After 1807, colonial plantations were forced to reconfigure systems of managing plantation life to account for all aspects of being, beginning with an explicit concern regarding the regulation and production of bodies, especially those of African women. As colonial administrators sought new ways to improve the production and reproduction of laboring bodies, they were confronted with the need to reconsider the enslaved female body as a specific object of medical and political intervention – a process of knowledge production that gained increasing articulation through different texts in this roughly 26-year period. Suddenly in need of investigating and managing the relationship between high mortality rates, quality of living, and birth rates, colonial administrators looked to a growing body of medical literature in order to closely mediate the lives of slaves and the reproductive capacity of enslaved mothers in particular. However, these texts responded to a variety of earlier, “sensationalist” texts that in different ways hypothesized the relationship between enslaved women and obeah.

Today many scholars understand the term obeah as signifying a diverse collection of religious, medical, and spiritual traditions developed (primarily) in the British West Indies. ⁶ However, at the turn of the nineteenth century, obeah’s accumulated meanings and power to disrupt colonial activity were inconsistently attributed to spiritual or diabolical black arts. By the 1820s, European medical knowledge had sought to discredit this power, nevertheless using obeah as a racial marker of foolishness or inferiority, even though as early as 50 years prior European writers incredulously described awe at these same powers. ⁷ Early narratives such as Stephen Fuller’s “Woman of the Popo Country,” Bryan Edwards’ History, Civil, and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, and William Holland’s Johnny Newcome etchings helped to initiate what Toni Wall Jaudon has described as “obeah fictions,” or the voluminous discourses surrounding obeah that often described a series of mysterious ailments, a diasporic (African) practitioner, a hidden stash of obeah objects, etc. ⁸ These items present the material embodiments of what Jaudon describes as the “sensory plurality” recorded in obeah fictions, seemingly everyday objects whose assembled meaning in the context of obeah rendered them strange and foreign. ⁹ “Sensation” here describes the affective power of obeah as a belief and practice for its adherents. However, I suggest that early obeah fictions also relied upon “sensationalist” rhetoric, exoticizing the possibilities of this foreign world to generate response from their metropolitan audiences. At the turn of the nineteenth century, these fictions crafted obeah into a cultural phenomenon imagined primarily for whites that, in Jaudon’s words, “consolidated the diverse practices of the enslaved into a textual phenomenon at once informative and pleasurable.” ¹⁰

As this article demonstrates, these fictions also produced representations of obeah to construct colonial knowledge about the female body – however, exactly “how” these texts imagined obeah and its use by enslaved women changes over this roughly 50-year span. ¹¹ First, I consider Stephen Fuller’s 1788 text, “Woman of the Popo Country.” Submitted to the Committee of Council for Trade and Plantations, this narrative was recounted by Fuller “from a Planter of Jamaica; a Gentleman of the finest veracity.” ¹² Despite its presentation as a true account, this narrative offers an example of an early obeah fiction steeped in sensationalist rhetoric. In this text, the obeah sensations wreaking havoc on the plantation are attributed to an obeah woman, whose power embodies a threatening, alternative version of colonial management. I then turn to William Earle’s 1801 novella Obi, or the History of Three-Fingered Jack. Earle’s Obi draws on medical and juridical figurations to craft obeah as an antiquated, old-world practice inconsistent with the transformed colonial spaces imagined by abolitionists. Responding to sensationalist accounts of slave revolution and revolt inspired by obeah while at the same time desiring emancipation, Earle imagines the excision of obeah through the condemnation and execution of the hero’s mother and her ties to African traditions. Obi takes its title from a variation on the spelling of obeah, and the obeah presented in the text is situated between the “sensationalist” fictions of Fuller’s time and the “dispelling” medicalization of obeah I explore next. Earle’s account sensationalizes obeah as a revolutionary act only to then divest it of its affective power by imagining the cultural transformations anticipated by emancipation.

Finally, I examine English doctor James Thompson’s 1820 medical text A Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes as they Occur in the Island of Jamaica with Observations on the Country Remedies. In this treatise Thompson addresses over 30 types of ailments common to the slaves of Jamaica and suggests systematic methods for preventing and curing diseases on the plantation. In particular, his text centers on the reproductive health of enslaved women with advice for planters concerning how to best maximize these women’s reproductive capabilities, a process that, as his representation of African medical and spiritual practices suggests, requires a world in which obeah is suppressed. Thomson’s treatise revises earlier attempts like Fuller’s and Earle’s texts to consolidate European disciplinary and rhetorical mastery over both obeah and women by reenvisioning obeah not as a sensationalist phenomenon, but as a medical one.

In early accounts like Fuller’s (and to a certain extent Earle’s), the role of women as obeah practitioners was part of the sensationalist apparatus of European obeah fictions. Medical texts like Thomson’s, in response to the changing demands of the colony, sought to reclaim both narrative and political authority over enslaved women’s bodies by divesting obeah of its sensational power. Together, these texts suggest a discursive, disciplinary trajectory for the intersections between obeah and black motherhood, first as a “sensationalist,” supernatural phenomenon without a determinate epistemological sensory referent, then as a potentially dangerous revolutionary discourse sensationalized by fearful colonial writers, and finally as a medical practice completely stripped of its supernatural force and directly subject to colonial discipline. These different generic attempts to imagine obeah also provided the means for imagining black womanhood from the perspective of European men. As I discuss in my conclusion, these representational practices helped to establish a biopolitical model of colonial discipline, productive of a negative legacy of gendered, racial caricatures concerning black women and specifically black mothers.

Obeah in changing Caribbean spaces

Despite its presentation to the British Parliament as a factual report detailing the impending crises of colonial production, Fuller’s early narrative, “Woman of the Popo Country,” ultimately sensationalizes what Jaudon describes as “obeah’s subversive potential,” a proliferating practice in need of control. ¹³ Though the effect of obeah on the plantation is widespread, it is recognized as a proximal exception to colonial rule, albeit one that robs plantation owners of laboring bodies that are, in 1788, imagined as replaceable through the slave trade. Nevertheless, the representation of obeah in the “Woman of the Popo Country” locates obeah’s power materially in the bodies and spaces belonging to enslaved women, “exposing” the relationship between obeah and these women in an attempt to reclaim European narrative authority in the epistemological sensorium opened by obeah.

Though Fuller’s recorded his narrative in 1788, it anticipates a newfound attention to enslaved women in interesting ways. The obeah woman is presented as a sensationalist and exceptional figure, an orientalist holdout from a seemingly unknowable African world whose gender and age temporarily allow her the means of socially reproducing obeah beneath the eyes of colonial authority. The narrative describes a “negress who had been ill for some time,” who upon her death bed, contacts the planter to inform him “her step-mother […] had put obi upon her, as she had also done upon those who had lately died.” ¹⁴ This “old woman had practised [sic] obi; for as many years past, as she could remember (and) that she (the obeah woman) carried on this business ever since her arrival from Africa, and was the Terror of the whole Neighborhood.” ¹⁵ The old obeah woman is represented as being well beyond reproductive age, “eighty years old but still hale and active.” ¹⁶ Nonetheless, it is implied that she has little to do on the plantation, making no significant contribution to the labor pool. Ultimately, the obeah woman is discovered and sold to Spanish slavers to live out the rest of her life in bonded labor in Cuba, and the effect of her departure is said to have immediately “animated (the slaves) with new spirits.” ¹⁷ In this pre-1807 account, the obeah practices eating away at the plantation are discovered and excised, and life is apparently free to go on under colonial rule. Obeah’s novelty prior to the banning of the trade necessitated that discipline be meted out through the brutal control of slaves’ labor, particularly through the management of spaces of labor. While women’s reproductive labor remains under-theorized as laboring bodies are still available via the trade, Fuller’s text recognizes the unacknowledged role women served as mediators of diasporic knowledge that often escaped the notice of colonial authorities in 1788. ¹⁸

Part of Fuller’s rhetorical strategy in sensationalizing obeah as a subterranean threat managed by women is to reclaim European narrative authority over representations of plantation spaces opened up by the “sensory plurality” of the obeah world. ¹⁹ As Jaudon notes,

What is fascinating and terrifying about obeah, for the authors of these fictions, is the fact that obeah practitioners seem to live at once within the space of the colony and, somehow, beyond it. Obeah’s secret rites and empowered objects marked the hazy appearance of a world differently organized. ²⁰

While Jaudon’s point concerns the alternative sensorium of a “world differently organized,” this world, or more specifically the possibility of this world, in turn circulated as part of a “sensationalist” discourse that was “pleasurable,” as well as terrifying for white, primarily metropolitan audiences. ²¹ In Fuller’s text, obeah offers an alternative epistemology, specifically through the apparent transformation of plantation space into some other kind of world that (perhaps) even worse in the eyes of white colonials – and particularly those writing for metropolitan audiences – might be maintained by women. However, as a sensationalist fiction, the disruptive break in meaning produced by the “hazy appearance” of this other world is mended through its demystification only after the possibility has been suggested that indeed, it may possess some sort of supernatural power. Thus, attempts at consolidating obeah’s “meaning” partially unravel since the sensational representation of obeah itself is (to an extent) founded upon circulating stories concerning the exotic novelty of this hidden other world.

In the text, the colonial planter encounters obeah’s sensual world as a clandestine network of supernatural effects that originate (for the white colonial investigator) in the material “implements” of the “old woman’s house,” and specifically in the obeah woman’s bedroom, formerly a veritable “non-space” in the standard colonial order. ²² Fuller recounts that the planter “repaired directly with six white servants to the old woman’s house; and forcing open the door, observed the whole inside of the roof (which was thatch). Every crevice of the walls, [was] stuck with the implements of her trade” (185). Fuller then describes how the party found a particular and familiar “variety of articles” that are common across obeah narratives, including “rags, feathers, bones of bats […] balls of earth or clay […] skulls of cats, cats’ teeth and claws […] human or dogs’ teeth […] egg shells” etc. (185–186). Hence, the obeah woman’s house is “instantly pulled down and with the whole of its contents committed to the flames” (186). The obeah woman’s “trade” as an obeah practitioner is understood in negative contrast to “proper” forms of plantation labor, as a subterranean practice imagined as consumptive as opposed to productive. In this context, the old woman’s bedroom is imagined as peripheral to colonial intervention insofar as it presents a space of unproductive, as opposed to productive and reproductive, labor, and the female body is imagined as a site of non-productive labor in need of direct command.

Rather than turning the woman over to the law of the island, “which would have punished her with death,” the obeah woman’s punishment is accomplished through her forced reentry into the slave labor market (186). Fuller recounts that out of a (distorted) sense of “humanity” the planter turns the old woman over to “a party of Spaniards” who, it is implied, will put her to a harder form of labor in Cuba (186). The “problem” in this sense is not fixable as a disciplinary matter of jurisprudence, but rather through the brute command of the slave market and in particular, through a more proscribed form of labor that, Fuller suggests, should be endemic to the condition of slavery. The Spaniards “happily” elect to take the old woman, despite the damage she wrought to the Jamaican plantation, because they “thought [her] not incapable of doing some trifling kind of work” (186). As an exception to the productive processes of the plantation, it is the idleness of the non-laboring older woman that allows the obeah world to fester. Her transportation to Cuba and relegation to a harder form of labor supposedly transforms the plantation overnight into a more familiar colonial space where slave life is consumed for the productive benefit of European wealth. Nonetheless, her story helped to initiate a haphazard European response to a force inconsistently recognized.

Fuller implicitly acknowledges that part of obeah’s power is related to its ability to circulate as rumor. At the outset of the story, Fuller writes of a series of suspicious deaths that “the obiah [sic] practice, was strongly suspected, as well by himself, as by the Doctor, and other white persons upon the plantation, as it was known to have been very Common in that part of the Island” (183). Fuller notes that the doctor attending the sick Africans “suspects” obeah, but that “he was unable to verify his suspicions, because his patients constantly denied their having anything to do with persons of that Order” (184). Yet when the “young negress” confesses on her deathbed to knowledge of her stepmother’s practice, the other slaves “ran in a body to their master, and confirmed the truth of it” (184). This description suggests that the suspicious European colonists fail to rhetorically manage obeah as a discursive, sensationalist phenomenon. In this case, the “obeah rumors” circulating within the plantation serve more to mystify than solve the problem of obeah, a problem reproduced by the circulation of the text’s account itself. In another part of his narrative, Fuller notes, “it may not be desirable that we should multiply examples to show the prevalence of this superstition” (188). Arguably, Fuller’s strategy backfires as this counterproductive note serves only to draw more attention to his cryptic, proliferating representations of obeah. Invested in the sensational accounts of a mysterious, foreign power, yet told as a true report, the “Woman of the Popo Country” presumably generated more rumors and wild ideas concerning the nature of obeah than it set to rest. Within this context, the obeah woman, otherwise an afterthought on the plantation, is reimagined as possessing a power whose rhetorical force alone shakes the colonial order of things. Fuller’s account can be seen as a failed attempt to inventory and restrain knowledge about obeah in order to reclaim authority over the knowledge-making processes of plantation management that begins with the productive (but not yet reproductive) capacities of women.

Transforming black revolution: displacing obeah and women in abolitionist fiction

William Earle’s 1801 epistolary novella Obi; or the History of Three-Fingered Jack uneasily employs obeah as a sensationalist element in his casting of the story of “Three-fingered Jack,” a former slave and maroon leader in the Blue Mountains region of Jamaica. Drawing on earlier sources such as “The Woman of the Popo Country” and Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764), the obeah in Obi, starting with the title, is both sensationalized and divested of its epistemic power, formally relegated to the margins of the text as an extended footnote. ²³ While the titular hero ultimately rejects obeah, the familiar colonial anxieties regarding not only obeah’s supernatural sensorium but also its revolutionary potential are displaced onto Jack’s fictional mother Amri. In this way, Obi looks backward, building off of earlier, sensationalist models of obeah, and forward toward a dispelled, de-ontologized model of obeah wherein the enslaved, and particularly enslaved women, are prefigured as dupes in order to reproduce a male revolutionary figure as the “correct” model of black subjectivity.

For roughly two years, between 1780 and 1781, the historical Jack Mansong led a group of escaped and former slaves in a series of raids against the British until he was finally ambushed by colonial agents and killed. During his life, local reports cast him as a murderous outlaw, intent on instigating rebellion. ²⁴ The voluminous “Three-fingered Jack” texts produced after his death vary in representing him as an outlaw, a charlatan, and a leader of rebellions both large and small. ²⁵ Today three-fingered Jack figures prominently in Jamaican culture as a sort of folk hero.

Where Fuller’s report struggles to consolidate what obeah “means,” later representations like Earle’s Obi, drawn from the stir surrounding events like Tacky’s Rebellion and the various maroon raids undertaken by figures like Mansong, were also forced to reckon with obeah’s revolutionary potential. ²⁶ In this sense, the consolidation of obeah’s meaning shifts to focus on its influence over slaves and its proliferation as a revolutionary practice regardless of the metaphysical or religious implications concerning its power. Here then, the obeah fictions that had swirled around the colonial world as rumor took hold in actual events taking place just as the slave trade was about to end. These themes intersect in the different iterations of the “Three-fingered Jack” story.

The popularity of the three-fingered Jack stories coincided with a growing interest in abolitionist politics, intersecting in conflicting ways. ²⁷ Paton suggests that many of these representations contained a

dynamic between insurgency and counter-insurgency [that] produced a contradictory narrative in which admiration for Jack’s heroism and, sometimes, explicit authorial antislavery sympathies, were nevertheless told through a plot culminating in the death of the rebel […] Because of this plotting, the versions which present Jack least sympathetically are the most ideologically coherent. ²⁸

Earle’s Obi, Paton argues, is ideologically incoherent, desiring to celebrate Jack as an antislavery figure while at the same time anxiously acknowledging the bloody historical reality of Mansong’s uprising. Obeah’s suspected role in these uprisings represented a sensational phenomenon itself, presenting a difficult challenge for abolitionist authors to reconcile when advocating on behalf of the enslaved. However, I argue that Obi is not as ideologically inconsistent as might first appear. Obi’s multigeneric form provides the ideological remedy capable of resolving the tensions inherent in the Jack story by employing a fictional mother, Amri, whose sacrifice allows the narrative to transition from a sensationalist fiction into a heroic romance. Amri and her association with obeah provide the foil through which Jack is reimagined as a sympathetic, even heroic, figure. By representing obeah in this way, Obi the novel manages obeah for abolitionist audiences sympathetic to the plight of slaves while problematically situating black women as a figure for black racial inferiority.

Amri is entirely fictional, presumably based on the various manifestations of the Inkle and Yarico story where the evil Captain Harrop plays the European who is stranded off the coast of West Africa and saved by the native Amri’s kindness, whom he later tricks and enslaves. ²⁹ Amri is the central figure in the first half of the novel, and her “misguided” notions of obeah’s spiritual and material potency saturate her narrative of bloody revenge. ³⁰ However, by the end of the novel Jack’s actions have transformed his mother’s quest for revenge into an abolitionist narrative of black redemption, and Jack dies a hero. Indeed, the text expresses an ambivalent reading of Jack early on as he begins seeking revenge for the horrors committed on his family by Captain Harrop. It is only in this context that obeah is explicitly associated with Jack, who, early in the narrative, is described as making his way to the cave of the obeah man where “fugitive negroes ran, to revenge themselves on those that did them injury: and here came the self-deluded Amri (Jack’s mother) with her aspiring son – to this horrible den of iniquity” (105). Early on it is revealed that Jack’s grandfather was also an obeah man and that part of Amri’s quest for revenge also concerns gaining vengeance for his execution (97). Here then, the text traces Amri’s revenge narrative to Africa through both her genealogical and cultural links to obeah, a heritage that is broken by Jack’s narrative in the second half of the text.

Earle’s Obi recasts Jack in light of his humanitarian-revolutionary qualities with roots in both the American and French Revolutions. ³¹ The text describes Jack as “A man! […] The precepts of his country were instilled into his heart, and he did no wrong […] He loved his countrymen, and the stream of consanguinity flowed warmly to his heart” (118). In this representation, Jack’s sentimental attachment to his countrymen is transformed in a New World context under the rubric of national belonging. Jack’s “true” nature is also stifled by his mother’s revenge quest. The text notes that “Jack had a noble soul; his breast might have harbored every endearing virtue, and, though when an infant, they were destroyed to gratify a mother’s revenge, still honor was his idol” (73). These values, projected on Jack, exemplify Earle’s loftier purpose in crafting Obi as an abolitionist text according to a culturally whitewashed logic that quarantines the more radical, habitually misunderstood aspects of enslaved cultures – the aspects Earle associates with the “bloody” “obeah world” of Jack’s mother, against the Enlightenment, materialist, abolitionist world ushered in by Jack. In doing so, Obi displaces African folk medicine, and its practitioners as ancillary, marginal, and archaic in the white abolitionist imagination for what black revolution “should” look like.

As both a woman and an obeah practitioner, Amri is unrecognizable as a political subject when colonial authorities capture her in the second half of the novel. At her questioning concerning Jack’s whereabouts after he abducts Captain Harrop, Amri evokes the name of “Obi,” at which the other slaves present “gave a dreadful scream and fell upon their faces” and the Europeans too “were alarmed. They knew what a panic the science had occasioned for many years among the slaves” (120). Amri is then sentenced to death by a colonial court but rescued just in time to die in Jack’s presence. Earle sends her out by emphasizing the Christian elements of her “last rites”:

Amri was taken from the sledge, and bound to the stake; a priest, in Christian mercy, implored rest for her soul, and his pious office prepared her mind to meet her fate with fortitude. This was the only indulgence that could be allowed, and the indulgence least needed. Amri wanted not fortitude; the heroic woman was prepared to die. (147)

Here then, in contrast to the transportation of the obeah woman in Fuller’s text, Amri is condemned to death as a representative figure for the historical condition of New World Africans. The family obeah, paralleled here with Amri’s African origins, dies with her in the New World. Hence, a genealogy linking African history, African cultural knowledge, and kinship is, in Earle’s imagination, necessarily severed as Jack is transformed into a New World subject.

Through Jack’s character, the sensationalist accounts of slave revolutions sparked by obeah’s mysterious powers are likewise reimagined through the African subject’s own disavowal of obeah’s power. In this context, Earle can negotiate the revolutionary impulse as transformative apart from the merely destructive “revenge” narrative initiated by Amri. Drawing explicitly from Fuller, Earle’s representation of obeah rehearses accounts that portrays the possession of material items like sharks’ teeth, grave dirt, etc., or what Earle terms “obi,” as granting its owner immunity from any bodily harm. However, at this point in the narrative, Jack has already moved past the beliefs of his countrymen and “placed but little confidence in the virtues of his Obi” (114). In contrast the other slaves’ reliance on obeah, the text suggests that “Jack, capable himself of performing great deeds, never once admitted the possibility that all men were not like him” (106). Further, despite the backdrop of the Haitian Revolution, Earle represents Jack as a loner, with just a small group of compatriots, managing to limit not only obeah’s epistemic force, but also the larger implications of island-wide rebellion through the figure of the exceptional individual. Part of this process involves the recognition that he possesses “strength superior to the boasted virtues of his Obi” (105). Jack’s employment and simultaneous disavowal of obeah’s power allows Earle to reclaim narrative authority on behalf of the enslaved, specifically, through representing the African subject as fully aware of obeah’s apparent fraudulent nature.

Jack’s new sensibilities are thus affirmed when, moving beyond his personal belief in his mother’s obeah, he cynically manipulates obeah as a revolutionary force, revealing the obeah sensorium as fraudulent for white readers. Nevertheless, Jack continues to evoke obeah as a way to compel other enslaved persons less “exceptional” than he. In the near-rescue of his mother, Jack threatens the advancing multitude, defiantly proclaiming “let no man advance, as he dreads this all powerful Obi, which renders me immortal, and devotes him to death” (148). In this sense, Jack is represented as both “in on the take,” yet nevertheless willing to employ belief in obeah against those “affrighted negroes” not already aligned with him (149). By overcoming his belief in obeah and recognizing his own exceptional status, Jack becomes a sympathetic character whose murderous exploits can be excused in terms of the political ethos expressed in the novella. In this way, Obi reduces black, masculine subjectivity into easily managed representations that reproduce racial hierarchy through a “soft” form of inclusive difference.

Black masculinity here is the explicit object of the forthcoming discipline Earle associates with a post-slavery society. However, in tracing obeah to Jack’s mother, Earle dialectically contrasts black masculinity with femininity, demonizing the latter in the process. Thus, both obeah and black womanhood are excised from the politics of abolitionism as aspects of African cultural reproduction, relegated to the margins of the text as part of the generic shift that allows Jack to become a tragic hero. In this imaginary, the African mother is made recognizable through her exclusion, explicitly condemned, and killed-off in a post-slave, enlightenment futurity. By imagining obeah as archaic and as inimical to abolition, obeah as a revolutionary (and hence sensationalist) discourse is conveniently written out of “acceptable” representations of black self-determination where the “proper” black male subject is crafted at the expense of the enslaved mother.

The genres of obeah fictions

Obeah’s gradual demystification through representations like the three-fingered Jack narratives suggests that the practice was reimagined as a challenge to colonial logic itself – as opposed to a threat to particular plantations. This process culminates in the shift from sensationalist fiction to medical reportage and from sensation and sensationalism to empiricism. This shift allowed colonial authors to negotiate the “sensory plurality” opened up by the obeah world, and in doing so, reproduced an epistemic framework wherein obeah practices could be regulated, at least in part, through their association with women. ³²

This is not to say that literary renditions of slavery and the ethics of colonial management disappeared with the oncoming medicalization of the black body and particularly of black women’s bodies. Rather, medical texts supplemented field observation and testimony with knowledge concerning obeah and slave cultural life drawn from earlier, influential literary texts like Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane and Earle’s Obi. However, the way these texts represented obeah required a significant transformation of the author as cultural interlocutor. As Wisecup suggests, Grainger’s different generic attempts to produce colonial knowledge regarding obeah reflected a need to separate his identity as an English writer from the possibility of colonial degeneration. According to Wisecup, Grainger’s failed georgic The Sugar-Cane had “reflected back on Grainger’s literary and intellectual abilities, raising questions about the degree to which the tropical climate had altered his mental faculties.” ³³ In response to this negative criticism, Grainger transformed the literary anecdotes concerning obeah and medicine in The Sugar-Cane into his medical treatise, Essay on the More Common West-Indian Diseases. Wisecup rightfully contends that this generic shift, from georgic poem to medical essay, reclaimed the author’s authority “by making learning, rather than the environment, the foundation of intellectual abilities and cultural identities … [while] effac[ing] African’s knowledge altogether from his Essay.” ³⁴ In the context of obeah, the proximity of writers, administrators, and physicians to sources of degeneration had to be reinvented as a problem not of environment, but of the racial body itself, a task only incompletely achieved by literary persons since they themselves, lacking the generic and epistemic authority to distinguish causes from effects, could be accused of suffering from moral and intellectual degeneration.

In contrast, medical reportage provided the generic means through which colonial authors could dialectically construct the terms of racial degeneration as well as their own privileged position as observers and commentators, rather than as participants, in a shared environment. While early commentators like Fuller had speculated on ways to alleviate the diseases affecting slaves on the plantation, these reflections came about through literary materials and texts as part of an informational culture that celebrated colonial enterprise while at the same time sensationalizing, criticizing, and even in some cases (as in Earle’s case) outright condemning the ethics of slavery. Knowledge concerning obeah was represented as “factual” but nevertheless circulated as exoticized, sensationalist accounts whose veracity (and authority) was tenuously maintained. Medical texts like Grainger’s Essay and James Thompson’s Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes produced a separation between sensation and its causes by employing a framework capable of divesting obeah of its epistemological power while at the same time positioning these authors as experts whose authority was inviolable. These texts both dispel obeah and consolidate knowledge concerning its practices through the management of enslaved women, thereby reasserting control at the level of the disciplinary subject. In this way, obeah is reimagined as a destructive but ultimately ineffectual practice consistent with the nascent biopolitical logic of late slaveocracy in the British Caribbean.

Obeah and enslaved motherhood

James Thomson’s 1820 A Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes, as They Occur in the Island of Jamaica with Observations on the Country Remedies was written in response to Grainger’s Treatise on the Disorders of the West Indies, citing that text’s “imperfections” in the “Introductory Remarks.” ³⁵ Though he claims to have traveled extensively in the West Indies, Thomson’s text appears directly indebted to David Collins’ 1803 Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies, in terms of both the diseases discussed and the European palliatives mentioned. However, Collins’ text is solely concerned with the treatment of various colonial diseases such as yaws, fevers, pox, etc. and makes no reference to witchcraft or obeah. ³⁶ In contrast, Thomson builds on Collins’ “remedies” specifically by addressing the social practices surrounding what he imagines as the intersection between “medicine and magic in the mind of the African” and the problems these beliefs present for colonial administrators (8). Thomson remarks that:

So completely has the idea of witchcraft gained a supremacy in their (enslaved Africans) minds, that he, who would attempt to destroy it by reasoning with them, would idly misapply the purpose of that noble faculty […] In Africa those that carry on the trade are called gree-gree men, and a most lucrative one it is […] in the West Indies they are termed obeah men, and are regarded with dread and veneration. (9)

Here Thomson conflates obeah practice with the then predominantly dispelled European notion of “witchcraft.” This dismissive characterization is in line with Paton’s argument concerning the gradual transformation of obeah into a petty criminal act. However, as I explore below, Thomson’s text strips obeah of its metaphysical and revolutionary potential while reimagining its power as consistent with European knowledge concerning race, medicine, and the body. This provides Thomson the ability to construct a disciplinarily situated place for enslaved womanhood, specifically through depicting enslaved motherhood as inherently “backwards” insofar as she is imagined as subject to the influence of obeah.

In Thomson’s formulation, obeah can only “work” as a result of the sensibilities of the “savage mind” (47). However, obeah nevertheless manifests in material practices inimical to colonial management. For example, in a section entitled “Dirt Eating” Thomson suggests that the habit of eating dirt practiced by “adult Negros” is also “attendant on the idea of their being under the influence of witchcraft” (47). This gives him occasion to speculate how these ideas are allowed to propagate:

The extent to which this [witchcraft] prevails is still great, and much less attention is given to it than it deserves. Most entertain the opinion that Christianity will remove it entirely, but witchcraft was invented long before Christianity, and the practice of it is much more suited to the savage mind than our refined notions of morality. Can it be expected that so simple a ceremony (for that is the sum of their religion) is to do away with traditions and superstitious practices, descended through the ages, the constant companions of their youth, and associated with their earliest recollections? The charms are irresistible, and, when the designs of wicked men bend their influence to personal interest, no power on earth can do away with the impression. (47)

In this somewhat tautological configuration, slaves are incapable of complex religious practice, forever subject to those “traditions and superstitious practices” that “wicked” obeah men and women seize upon. Thomson then reimagines African subjectivity through obeah specifically as susceptible to a form of culturally reproducible knowledge at odds with colonial management. Through their participation in obeah, enslaved Africans are reimagined as subjects of colonial discipline, precariously positioned at the threshold of political recognizability. In this light obeah is no longer imagined as external to a system of political order, but rather as a violation of the internal rules of the colonial system, whose definition, and hence political agency, could be regulated and directed by colonial law. In contrast to Fuller, writing 60 years earlier, Thomson encourages readers to regard belief in obeah as both a strain on the maintenance of the colonial labor force and as a symptom of, in Thompson’s words, the “black race’s inability to progress” (9). ³⁷ This example suggests that colonial medical texts, focusing on the intersections of labor and the body, firmly situated enslaved women at the heart of both these concerns.

Despite the volume of sensationalist texts surrounding obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, medical texts prior to the banning of the trade do not hypothesize the relation between women and obeah. These early texts often used the same, sometimes inarticulate, terms that sensationalist fictions employed or failed to discuss the practice at all when discussing the reproductive capacity of enslaved women. ³⁸ For example, in Practical Rules, only brief attention is given to women as subjects of especial interest to plantation managers. Concerning birth and procreation, Collins expresses a general ambivalence as to which is a better method of maintaining a labor force: the African slave trade or domestic “breeding” (151). Ultimately, anticipating the eventual decline of the trade, Collins suggests that planters consider the benefits of domestic breeding, claiming

that it is much cheaper to breed than to purchase; the price of new Negros being three times as great as it was forty years ago, and a possibility existing, that we may be finally excluded from that source of supply. (153)

However, in the very next section entitled “Labor,” Collins suggests that no distinction should be made between the kinds of labor men and women perform as there are “many women who are capable of as much labor as men; and some men, of constitutions so delicate, as to be incapable of toil as the weakest woman” (153). As in Fuller’s text, women unexpectedly become a problem for a system of colonial management that formerly had no reason to recognize either cultural or biological differences between the sexes. This suggests that despite Collins’ attempt to look forward to the moment when the trade finally disappears, colonial administrators had no great inclination to privilege women’s physical labor over their reproductive labor (176). ³⁹

In contrast to Collins, both the physical and reproductive labor of female slaves concerns Thomson, particularly as they are influenced in relation to what he identifies as witchcraft and obeah. Thomson suggests it is:

The obvious policy of all West India proprietors to render Negro women the objects of their particular care, so as to ensure their becoming mothers and rearing a healthy offspring. The irregular habits and dispositions of these people present lasting obstacles to their desirable purpose. (110)

Thomson implies that these “habits” or practices result from a belief in not only the power of obeah, but also material knowledge concerning the world organized by obeah. Here, the material objects of the obeah world are reduced in Thomson’s text as a series of inert materials employed in misinformed medical practices such as dirt eating. In this way, not only is obeah demonized as merely misguided, so too are the women who fall under its influence, especially as it impacts their reproductive labor.

Thomson’s advice on managing pregnant women addresses two overlapping concerns: one having to do with the maintenance of their physical reproductive capabilities and the other concerning their attempts to use obeah as a way to resist both their productive and reproductive labor through both feigned and actual abortion. Thomson warns that:

Planters everywhere find pregnant women most difficult to manage. They have so many prejudices, so many wants, that it is impossible to satisfy them […] A little policy is absolutely requisite, and much firmness in insisting on performing whatever duties are required of them. (112)

“Management” here is an important term. While Thomson recommends adherence to a routine of forced, productive labor, “management” conceptually extends beyond this form of labor to include the care of the enslaved mother’s body – a new object of attention that Thomson imagines as imperiled by practitioners of obeah. Thomson suggests:

Many young females, from peculiar prejudices and an aversion to relinquish their former habits, whenever they find themselves pregnant, endeavor to procure abortion by every means in their power, in which they are too often assisted by the knavery of others. The effect of these repeated miscarriages operates dreadfully on the tender frame of the mother, and not unusually terminates in death, or incapability of future impregnation. (111)

However, while Thomson dismissingly rejects spiritual and metaphysical accounts concerning the obeah sensorium throughout his text, obeah and similar African traditions are nevertheless recognized as a form of knowledge capable of providing a means of resistance to the theft of women’s reproductive labor. It is implied that these “knaves” include midwives and other practitioners who might assist the pregnant woman in the performance of certain African customs to induce labor early as a means of abortion or infanticide.

While it is difficult to determine precisely how often enslaved women sought out abortion, their reliance on the advice of the enslaved community, as opposed to European doctors, seems obvious in this case. ⁴⁰ As Barbara Bush-Slimani suggests, “Caribbean planters frequently accused women of procuring abortions and frustrating their attempts to increase the slave population, linking this practice to promiscuity.” ⁴¹ We must remember that obeah presents a larger epistemic complex that was just as often associated with medical expertise as with spiritual or religious beliefs. Jerome Handler broadly characterizes African medical practices transported to the New World as “holistic” and that New World Africans’ “pharmacopeia […] was overwhelmingly composed of plant medicines.” ⁴² Further, Handler suggests that, “At certain periods, whites may have occasionally used the terms ‘Negro doctor’ and ‘Obeah person’ interchangeably.” ⁴³ In any case, certain forms of African medicine almost certainly concerned abortion, regardless of whether white doctors recognized this knowledge as obeah or not. Nevertheless, in responding to these apparently successful attempts at inducing abortion, Thomson recognizes that these “knaves,” and by implication, obeah itself, possessed a kind of efficacy recognizable in western medical terms.

Obeah’s influence on the sexuality and reproductive practices of the enslaved is also repeated throughout Thomson’s text as an intervention that aims to limit systems of cultural reproduction – specifically concerning medical knowledge – while increasing women’s biological-reproductive capabilities. These practices, along with obeah, are traced to African origins and are suggestive of discourses concerning sexual health, sexuality, and attitudes toward sex imagined by colonial doctors as self-mismanagement and as a marker of racial difference. ⁴⁴ Regarding venereal diseases more generally, Thomson suggests that many enslaved persons “have recourse, after using their own means, to the assistance of those who form too numerous a body, by promising to perform a quick and certain cure.” ⁴⁵ In this sense, obeah is involved in a complex of “fraudulent” practices with African origins that suggest an alternative medical framework imagined as capable of providing palliatives for a variety of sicknesses, including complications associated with reproduction and sexuality.

In this sense, the obeah world and the colonial world increasingly overlap. Whatever its source of power, obeah presents a disruptive complex of discourses and practices utilizable by enslaved women. Through medical writing, the gradual closing of the possibility of another “world differently organized,” along with the need for reproducing, laboring bodies, positioned enslaved women as subjects of administrative care. ⁴⁶ By foregrounding his treatise as an intervention concerning the practices of the “savage mind,” among which obeah predominantly figured, Thomson imagines obeah as a discourse situated at the intersection between medicine and labor – especially where reproductive labor exists at a premium. Hence, obeah’s intervention extends beyond the body of the enslaved mother to the construct of “motherhood” itself. Thomson’s text elaborates an important shift in the colonial understanding of obeah as something recognizable but at the same time destructive to the goals of colonial production.

In Thomson’s rubric of enslaved motherhood, African women inexplicably imperil themselves, as well as their children, using obeah as a means toward this end. Thompson suggests, “The negroes’ motherly instincts are often so deficient as to allow them to insensibly harm their own child out of ignorance.” ⁴⁷ If the power of obeah in this scenario is reducible to “fraud,” the utility or rationale for its use is only traceable to the endemic ignorance of black mothers. What we are inadvertently left with then is the suggestion that obeah presented enslaved mothers with the material means to resist the theft of their labor – in this case both their productive labor and the labor associated with giving birth and rearing children. In the context, obeah’s material reality is located in the practices of enslaved motherhood as something both more and less than “simple fraud.”

From Fuller’s old obeah woman to Earle’s Amri, representations of “flawed” or unproductive women and mothers increasingly informed “obeah fictions.” These fictions coalesce in later medical texts concerning the care of the enslaved body as a way to position enslaved mothers as “sub-agential” subjects existing at the threshold of disciplinary power. ⁴⁸ “Proper” forms of motherhood, in accounts like Thomson’s, are contrasted with the practices of enslaved women as a way to manage their reproductive labor, but stop short of allowing the formation of the kinship structures that pattern white, bourgeois domesticity. As Nancy Bentley suggests, “kinlessness in this sense is clearly social and juridical, a name for a condition imposed by force.” ⁴⁹ However, kinlessness in the context of New World slavery was produced through a variety of juridical, social, and discursive practices – practices that ultimately positioned the black, enslaved mother as incapable of properly caring for her children, making it all the easier to take them away from her out of a sense of “concern.” The mothers in Thomson’s texts are “flawed” insofar as they are imagined as subject to the fraudulent sway of obeah and as obeah offered a way for authors to invent the limits of black domesticity and motherhood – a heritage of the colonial world that, as Hortense Spillers suggests, is still very much with us today. ⁵⁰ Obeah is newly imagined as a potent cultural force that places the enslaved mother at the crossroads of two fictions: between racial-biological essentialism and domestic motherhood. This structure locates black motherhood and obeah as particularly central to what Paul Gilroy has termed the “counter-cultures of modernity.” ⁵¹

Obeah and the heritage of colonial biopolitics

In conclusion, I turn to the political world stage to suggest that efforts to imagine black women through the lens of obeah fictions reflects a key moment in the development of dominant cultural strategies for subjectifying and controlling its citizens. The distinctive representations of obeah and black motherhood examined here plot a trajectory wherein enslaved women were first imagined as expendable, then as marginal to abolitionist constructions of black self-determination, and then as “bad mothers” incapable of properly caring for their children. Finally, then, recasting obeah fictions as medical “truth” provided colonial writers a way to craft enslaved women as “sub-agential” subjects whose forms of both cultural and biological reproduction could be managed.

Here we can understand the importance of obeah fictions for European lawmakers who restricted the civil rights, and more specifically, the reproductive rights of women as the institution of officially sanctioned slavery was closing in the British Caribbean. In Fuller’s account, the obeah woman is imagined as an external enemy of the colonial state. And though she escapes death, she is immediately excised from the plantation and transported to Cuba. In Earle’s text, the obeah mother is executed, severing multiple African genealogical and cultural ties in an attempt to craft a “proper” abolitionist black (male) subject. However, as Thomson’s text demonstrates, an increasingly articulated set of textual knowledge concerning obeah brought slave life, and in particular the lives of enslaved women, into political calculation, if only to continue to reconfigure the ways in which their labor could be exploited. No longer external to disciplinary calculation, nor excisable under a colonial system of brute violence, obeah fictions position women within a system of biopolitical control while working within familiar racial and gender hierarchies.

This trajectory suggests that obeah fictions played an important part in the rise of a dangerous and contradictory power that biopolitical governmentality reserves for itself: the right to both make live and make die. Famously, Foucault contends that modern biopolitics evolves out of the logic of race war. ⁵² Through this, modern states reserve their right to kill, even in disciplinary society, by essentializing the differences between national and racial groups, in turn conceiving of the life and well-being of one group as dependent on the subjection and continual surveillance of the other. In our present moment, the right to make die has become a defining feature of biopolitical modernity in the transnational, transglobal quest to “defend society” from its enemies, increasingly located within the supranational spaces to which governmentality extends. The fluidity of juridical space and the inability to confine the “enemy” to a readily identifiable religion, ethnic group, or even gendered body construct a version of the enemy that is potentially anywhere, thereby justifying, in Leerom Medovoi’s words, “a living world that must wage bloody war against itself, that must avidly kill its internal enemies so that life worth living can continue.” ⁵³ Obeah presented colonial authorities with a way to imagine black mothers as both a subject of, yet irreparably distinct from, the colonial community, coeval with the colonial transition from older forms of command and punishment to interpellation and discipline. This inversion of the old maxim that to have peace within its borders a society must wage war outside of them was founded upon the biopolitics of the colony as a space of indeterminable threat. While it may be overstating the case that obeah fictions facilitated the invention of particular gendered differences within the already racialized colonial state, they most certainly contributed to their evolution.

Notes on contributor

Jeffrey C. Cottrell is a doctoral candidate of English at Northeastern University. His work concerns the production of space and belonging in early nineteenth-century North America. His dissertation is titled Revolutionary Geographies: Contested Spaces and Geographic Writing in Antebellum America 1790–1861.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Elizabeth Maddock Dillon who has guided me throughout the development of this project and to Toni Jaudon and Kelly Wisecup for their work in putting this issue together. Thanks also to the Boston Public Library Rare Books room staff. Also, many thanks to Danielle Skeehan, Anne Gray Fischer, Benjamin Doyle, Emily Artiano, and the entire Northeastern reading group for all their help. Additional thanks to Marina Leslie, Amy Greenstadt, Leerom Medovoi, James Capell, Simon Green, and Joseph Fultz for their continued support. Finally, I’d like to dedicate this work to the memories of my grandfather and grandmother Robert “Bob” Sawyer and Neta Sawyer and to Milo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a more thorough study concerning the “mortuary politics” or politics of death in Jamaica under slavery see Vincent Brown's, The Reaper's Garden.

2. Paton, “Enslaved Women,” 10.

3. Bush-Slimani, “Hard Labour,” 143.

4. Higman, Slave Populations, 314.

5. Paton, “Enslaved Women,” 10.

6. For an introduction to obeah as a religious phenomenon, see Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert's Creole Religions. For an excellent history of later colonial policies regarding obeah see Diana Paton and Maarit Forde's collection Obeah and Other Powers. For a study concerning how particular members of the enslaved community might have leveraged colonial policies regarding obeah toward their favor see Randy M. Browne's “The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah.” For a Fuller study of the evolution of “obeah” as a term see Jerome S. Handler and Kenneth M. Bilby's “On the Early Use and Origin.”

7. Paton notes in her article “Obeah Acts” that “official views of obeah have always been negative, but they have not always been the same. In the post-slavery period, the legal construction of obeah shifted from being primarily about witchcraft to being primarily about fraud, with significant effects” (2). As I discuss later, this shift is recognizable in medical literature concerning the African body anticipating this post-slavery legal transformation.

8. Jaudon, “Obeah's Sensations,” 716.

9. Jaudon, “Obeah's Sensations,”, 729; many obeah fictions – from Grainger's Sugar-Cane to various plays and pantomimes such as John Fawcett's 1800 Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack preceding Earle's novella – include descriptions of various items such as those inventoried in Fuller's account. As Jaudon notes, these inventories “offer their audiences the reassurance that there is one way of sensing the world” (728). However, as I discuss throughout the article, this assurance is fleeting.

10. Jaudon, “Obeah's Sensations,” 716.

11. For a larger study concerning the conditions of enslaved women in Jamaica see Lucille Mathurin Mair, Hilary McDonald Beckles, and Verene Shepherd's Historical Study; also see Verene Shepherd's collection Engendering History.

12. Fuller, House of Commons, 182.

13. Jaudon, “Obeah's Sensations,” 716.

14. Fuller, House of Commons, 183.

15. Fuller, House of Commons, 184.

16. Fuller, House of Commons, 183.

17. Fuller, House of Commons, 186.

18. Arguably, early European accounts of obeah rarely recognized gendered forms of labor. Grainger's The Sugar-Cane, for example, only remarks on one feature of gendered labor in describing African families, “where the men do nothing but hunt, fish or fight, and all field drudgery is left to the women” (125).

19. Jaudon, “Obeah's Sensations,” 729.

20. Jaudon, “Obeah's Sensations,”, 716.

21. Jaudon, “Obeah's Sensations,”, 716.

22. Fuller, House of Commons, 185. All subsequent quotations cited parenthetically within the text.

23. Earle directly cites “The Woman of the Popo Country” in his footnote descriptions of obeah. However, as I argue later, the obeah presented in the text is exoticized in order to dismissingly excise it from Earle's abolitionist imaginary. In this sense, the formal marginalization of earlier accounts of obeah is consistent with the marginalization of Amri and her belief in obeah over the course of the narrative.

24. Frances R. Botkin traces the first reports of Jack's activity to the Jamaican Royal Gazette, 494.

25. For more on the particular circumstances of Jack's death see Aravamudan's “Introduction,” 11–13.

26. For more on how colonists imagined obeah as a “revolutionary” discourse see Diana Paton's “Obeah Acts.”

27. In “The Afterlives of Three-Fingered Jack,” Paton notes that “in 1800, when interest in Three-finger Jack was at its height, the legislative goal of opponents of slavery was ‘abolitionist’ rather than ‘emancipationist’: focused on the campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade rather than slavery itself” (42). At the same time, however, the then ongoing Haitian Revolution stirred fears concerning “the possibility of successful rebellion in the British colonies” (43).

28. Paton, “Afterlives,” 44.

29. The original Inkle and Yarico story comes from a supposedly true tale recounted in Richard Ligon's 1657 History of the Island of Barbadoes but was probably better known in Earle's time through George Colman's 1787 comic opera version.

30. The mock epistolary form of the novella takes another twist as Earle's fictive narrator George Stanford relates Amri's story literally as a story told to her son, Jack: “‘ My son,’ cried she, ‘now is the time arrived when you should contend for the rights of yourself and mother. Now is the time when you should revenge my cause. You are arrived to maturity, and, to inspire you to revenge my injuries, I will relate the misfortunes of my life’” (73). Amri's entire backstory then is related as a justification for revenge. All subsequent quotations from the text cited parenthetically.

31. It would be interesting to consider how much Earle might have modeled his representation of Jack as a revolutionary figure from the then ongoing Haitian revolution.

32. Jaudon, “Obeah's Sensations,” 729.

33. Wisecup, Medical Encounters, 144.

34. Wisecup, Medical Encounters, 147–149.

35. Thomson, A Treatise, 1. All subsequent quotations from the text cited parenthetically.

36 Collins, Practical Rules, 151.

37. Also, for more on the workload of enslaved persons in this period see Richard S. Dunn's “‘Dreadful Idlers’ in the Cane Fields.”

38 For another example, see Benjamin Moseley's Treatise on Sugar, which in turn, almost certainly borrowed from Fuller's account of obeah in describing the material implements of the practice.

39 This is further indicated as a general condition of plantation slavery. As Paton argues in “Enslaved Women,” colonial administrators’ “willingness to pay more for men than for women, despite the fact that any children born to enslaved women would also be the slaveowners’ property and would thus increase their wealth, suggests that they preferred to buy new enslaved people from Africa rather than bear the costs of raising children.”

40 For more on the history of Afro-Caribbean medical palliatives and obeah, see Jerome S. Handler's “Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados.”

41 Bush-Slimani, “Hard Labour,” 92.

42 Handler, “Slave Medicine,” 60, 64.

43 Handler, “Slave Medicine,” 64; for example, see Welsh naturalist Griffith Hughes’ Natural History of Barbados where he recognizes obeahmen as both “physicians and conjurors” (15).

44 Thomson, A Treatise, 49.

45 Thomson, A Treatise, 60.

46 Jaudon, “Obeah's Sensations,” 716.

47 Jaudon, “Obeah's Sensations,”, 112.

48 I borrow the term “sub-agential” from Elizabeth Maddock Dillon in her work “Obi, Assemblage, Enchantment.” According to Dillon, the sub-agential subject is one “who inhabits a world defined by dispersed, deindividuated subjectivity – a world in which sub-agential subjects cohabit with semi-agential objects, a world in which the assemblage of things and bodies is the locus of meaning, possibility, and poiesis” (178). Though Dillon convincingly reconsiders this subject as suggestive of an “ethics” of inhabiting the world through “distributed (not rehabilitated) agency,” my use of the term here draws attention to how colonial agents exploited this imposed (177–178).

49 Bentley, “Fourth Dimension,” 270.

50 Critics such as Spillers and bell hooks have provided convincing arguments linking colonial racism and slavery to modern representations of black women and their roles within dominant forms of kinship relations. In particular, Spillers suggests, “the African-American female's ‘dominance’ and ‘strength’ come to be interpreted by later generations – both black and white, oddly enough – as a ‘pathology’” (73). Also, for an excellent discussion on the intersections of science, reproductive rights, and the continued derision of black mothers, see Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body.

51 Gilroy, “Black Atlantic,” 49.

52 Foucault, Society, 60.

53 Medovoi, “Global Society,” 74.