On knowing and not knowing about obeah

Abstract

This essay introduces Obeah: knowledge, power, and writing in the early Atlantic World, a special issue responding to recent scholarly interest in obeah and related creole and African-derived medical and religious practices common among enslaved Africans in the pre-emancipation Caribbean. It describes obeah and the epistemological conundrum it posed for colonists in the global Atlantic world, outlining possibilities for how scholars might study the texts that represent these practices.

Keywords:

• obeah
• religion
• medicine
• archival work
• assemblage
• British West Indies

We position this special issue at the confluence of several recent interdisciplinary scholarly conversations: the reconfiguration of relations between religion and science, reconsiderations of colonial archives and their representation of subordinated peoples, and new scholarship about obeah, a medical and religious complex employed by enslaved Africans, primarily in the West Indies. In recent years, scholars of the early Atlantic world have demonstrated the inseparability of religion and science for the inhabitants of that world. Historians of science have reconceived the disciplines as fields that were not stable and separate by the end of the Enlightenment but as stabilizing entities that defined themselves by drawing upon techniques from other fields.¹ Indeed, recent studies of key religious and scientific figures, from Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather to Benjamin Franklin and Francis Daniel Pastorius, have shown that these men integrated multiple fields to produce their intellectual work.² And, as James H. Sweet’s study of African healer Domingos Álvares shows, lesser known healers likewise combined what we could now call medicine and religion. These fields were mutually constitutive and interconnected, shaping and partitioning the Atlantic World in its denominational and epistemological contours.³

Meanwhile, other scholars have begun to explore new methods for reading colonial archives and new strategies for recovering and studying the knowledge and beliefs of unfree and minority peoples. Scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler, Joseph Epstein, and Betty Joseph – the latter two focusing in particular on Caribbean archives – position archiving as an ongoing process that produces documents with histories and itineraries of their own rather than stable, complete entities with secure meanings. Thus, these scholars, as Stoler puts it, read “along the grain,” in order to uncover how “[c]olonial archives were sites of command – but of countermand as well.”⁴ While maintaining a skeptical awareness of the ways that imperial archives sought to define and discipline its subjects and sources, these scholars also show that archives represent moments in which attempts at discipline failed, when people were caught off guard, anxious, and uncertain.

One culmination of these insights about disciplinarity and colonial archives is found in studies of obeah, which have instigated a vibrant, interdisciplinary conversation about forms of power and knowledge in the Caribbean. Scholars from anthropology, history, literary studies, and religious studies have recognized the key role that obeah played in shaping the world that colonists and Africans inhabited and the texts that represented that world. Revising earlier scholarship that, utilizing a transparent reading of colonial texts, dismissed obeah as African superstition and black magic, scholars from Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby to Tim Watson and Diana Paton have shown how obeah and its representations allowed colonists and Africans alike to claim rhetorical, legal, and epistemological power.⁵

Co-edited by two literary scholars whose scholarly work focuses on medicine and on religion, respectively, this special issue joins and expands these conversations, by analyzing previously unconsidered archives about obeah, by accounting for the disciplinary work that colonial accounts of obeah performed by managing African women’s bodies, and by tracing how the power of religion and science manifests itself in the Atlantic World. As all of the articles in this special issue demonstrate, the archive on obeah contains accounts, reports, and documents that register and circulate epistemological anxieties that sometimes remained outside colonists’ textual and political control. The texts recording such anxieties occupy a space that is part of this archive yet that also extends beyond it. It is this space – one that is experiential, bureaucratic, material, and textual – that the articles in this special issue investigate and that, we argue, manifests colonial attempts to transform obeah into a set of knowable practices, on the one hand, and the range of practices, beliefs, and knowledge that Africans employed as a form of power in the Atlantic World, on the other.

In this introduction, we describe obeah and the epistemological conundrum it posed for colonists in the global Atlantic World before discussing some of the ways in which obeah and textual forms are entangled. As we think this special issue demonstrates, this entanglement offers a particularly productive site at which to analyze obeah’s powers and the representation of those powers.

How to write the history of obeah

“Obeah” refers to a set of practices employed by Africans for ends that enslaved peoples perceived as socially useful, from healing and revenge, to protection and rebellion. These practices were constituted by what we would now designate as separate medical and religious components: the knowledge and application of herbal remedies; singing or chanting prayers or powerful words; a diagnosis of physical ailments; and mediation with non-human powers. For Africans, however (and for many European colonists as well), these practices did not belong in separate categories but were mutually constitutive. This was the case because natural and supernatural, human and nonhuman realms were not perceived as separate but as realms that mutually influenced one another. Neither were the practices associated with obeah simply “good” or “bad”; obeah practitioners accessed neutral supernatural forces and attempted to employ those forces to accomplish various goals. As Dianne Stewart points out, obeah is a “protean institutional structure encompassing ethnic and Pan-African religious cultures, which co-author an African-derived understanding of mystical power as the capacity to use energy dynamically.”⁶ Indeed, Stewart finds that obeah took a variety of forms, even being “reasserted under the mask of Christianity” during the 1831 Baptist Rebellion in Jamaica.⁷

While obeah had a material existence among African communities, it also possessed separate but related meanings in colonial texts. There, the term “obeah” originated in the early eighteenth century as a word Europeans in the Caribbean applied to African practices that, they acknowledged, acted powerfully on peoples’ bodies and minds. As Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby have pointed out, “‘Obeah’ became a catch-all term for a range of supernatural-related ideas and behaviors that were not of European origin and which [whites] heavily criticized and condemned.”⁸ In the early eighteenth century, colonists variously compared obeah to folk medicine, superstition, and healing practices; after Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760 (in which an obeah man allegedly gave rebels a potion to protect them from planters’ bullets), they increasingly connected obeah to witchcraft and to poison in the British and French West Indies, respectively. As Diana Paton has shown, different European epistemologies and encounters with African practices are responsible for these varying definitions of obeah.⁹

Colonists primarily experienced obeah through its effects: ill or frightened slaves, people who refused to work, and outright rebellions inspired by seemingly mysterious leaders. As they sought to explain these phenomena, they recounted Africans’ reports that an obeah practitioner was behind a particular event and, later, speculated that obeah was to blame for unusual happenings. In doing so, colonists also sought to incorporate obeah into European epistemologies, with the goal of identifying the natural causes that, they argued, were the primary powers at work in the world. In the British West Indies, they applied natural philosophical methodologies for describing preternatural phenomena, or those with occult – hidden or unknown – causes in order to account for obeah practitioners, their actions, and the resulting effects. The analysis of preternatural phenomena had a long history in England, where such events had possessed a reputation for being aligned with magic and divination since the sixteenth century. Because preternatural phenomena had invisible causes, they fell somewhere between supernatural, or divine, phenomena (which also lacked visible causes) and natural phenomena (which were also said to be result of actions by created beings, from humans to angels and devils). In the course of the seventeenth century, however, preternatural phenomena were “naturalized”; that is, their angelic and demonic causes were excluded, leaving only natural or human causes as possibly responsible for the preternatural, even when those causes were undiscoverable (and they often were).¹⁰ At the same time, preternatural phenomena came to play a key role in the Baconian project of collecting unusual natural particulars in order to gain insights into the hidden workings of nature. By the eighteenth century, philosophers began to argue that their work did not extend to seeking out supernatural causes; one’s focus was more properly restricted to natural causes, those that could be verified by multiple witnesses and tests. Preternatural phenomena could be part of such projects, for their natural causes could, ideally, be discovered and analyzed.

Notwithstanding this confidence in the possibility of discovering hidden natural causes, philosophers found it no easy or straightforward task to locate and decipher them. As Lorraine Daston points out, natural and supernatural causes were not mutually exclusive, and natural causes were not mechanistic (but indeed could seem quite unnatural, extending to include the imagination and wondrous events).¹¹ As a result, philosophers worried less about whether they would mistake divine and demonic causes for one another than whether they would be deceived into categorizing a phenomenon as supernatural when it was not. Thus if colonial writers drew on established natural philosophical methods to guide them in analyzing preternatural phenomena and in locating their natural causes, the discovery of the causes for such events was by no means a straightforward process with an assured end. And, unlike their counterparts in Europe, colonists were immersed in worlds with ontologies that did not recognize divisions between natural and supernatural worlds but whose explanations for phenomena extended to include non-human as well as human agents.¹² Colonists faced the challenge of incorporating obeah into eighteenth-century empirical epistemologies and consequently of discovering and representing its natural causes in a context in which those practicing and drawing on obeah did not recognize divisions between natural and supernatural causes. As Katharine Gerbner explains in her contribution to this issue, Afro-Caribbean people likewise faced the challenge of incorporating colonists into their epistemologies: enslaved Africans in Jamaica called Moravian missionary George Caries “obea,” a term that he defined as a “Seer,” a seemingly surprising turn given obeah’s connotations with Afro-Caribbean practices, especially witchcraft. Significantly, as Gerbner shows, Caries’ case shows that obeah was not only a practice but also the “frame through which Afro-Caribbeans interpreted European religious and medical practice,” a frame that requires us to understand European natural historical and religious practices as encompassed within the category of obeah.

Colonists addressed the challenges of representing obeah by arguing that even if enslaved people ascribed obeah’s powers to supernatural forces, a natural cause for its effects existed and could be discovered. They developed several strategies for discovering and describing these causes: they linked obeah’s apparent power to Africans’ allegedly faulty understandings to suggest that Africans mistook as supernatural what were only hidden natural causes. Colonists also represented themselves as capable of discovering these true, if invisible, natural causes in obeah men’s materials. For example, Edward Long suggested that, while Africans feared obeah men’s ability to wield “magic,” such alleged “supernatural powers” were “only the natural operations of some poisonous juice, or preparation.”¹³ Similarly, James Grainger noted that Africans believed in “magic spells,” and he called on poetry to: “Transpierce the gloom, which ignorance and fraud/Have render’d awful; tell the laughing world/Of what these wonder-working charms are made.”¹⁴ By exposing the natural causes behind “wonder-working charms,” colonists would prove obeah to be a phenomena that could be brought into the light, studied, and explained with recourse to natural causes. Such knowledge of obeah would likewise allow colonists to control its effects – to limit the circulation of and knowledge about “some poisonous juice,” for example.

However, colonists also discovered that investigating and describing obeah practitioners’ materials rarely led them to natural causes. For example, after confidently charging the muses with revealing the components of obeah practitioners’ “wonder-working charms,” Grainger went on to list those components:

Fern root cut small, and tied with many a knot;

Old teeth extracted from a white man’s skull;

A lizard’s skeleton; a serpent's head:

These mix’d with salt, and water from the spring,

Are in a phial pour’d; o’er these the leach

Mutters strange jargon, and wild circles forms.¹⁵

While Grainger initially assured his audience that obeah’s actions in the world could be traced back to natural causes, his delineation of obeah practitioners’ materials hardly fulfills this promise. The obeah man’s “wonder-working charms” are indeed partly composed of material objects with natural properties: a fern root, salt, and water have qualities that a physician like Grainger could discuss in terms of natural causes, and even a lizard’s skeleton and serpent’s head could likewise possess qualities that a medical practitioner might employ as part of a healing concoction. But as Grainger went on to explain, the fern root is not valued solely for its natural qualities but also because it is “tied with many a knot,” and the concoction is not complete until the obeah man adds charms – “strange jargon” and “wild circles.” In addition, the entities in the concoction do not appear to be powerful because of individual qualities they possess; instead, it is as a mixture, combined with “strange jargon” and “wild circles” that they possess force over bodies and minds.

Colonial accounts of obeah from the mid-eighteenth to the nineteenth century exhibit this same pattern: an insistence that obeah is decipherable in terms of natural causes and an enumeration of material objects with ostensibly natural properties, in addition to a description of those objects as obtaining power as a combination or mixture.¹⁶ These powerful mixtures exist both within colonial texts and in the material practices of enslaved Africans. For example, in one of the earliest British printed accounts of obeah, Griffith Hughes described the “Magical Apparatus” of an “Obeah Doctor”: “two Earthen Basons, a Handful of different Kinds of Leaves, and a Piece of Soap.”¹⁷ By the end of the eighteenth century, lists of obeah materials had become a trope in British colonial descriptions of obeah. Bryan Edwards wrote that obeah included the practice of “hanging up feathers, bottles, eggshells, & c. & c. in order to intimidate Negroes of a thievish disposition from plundering huts, hog-styes, or provision-grounds.”¹⁸ Meanwhile, in a text that spawned numerous accounts of obeah and that has been central to scholarly analyses, including several in this introduction and in this special issue more broadly, physician Benjamin Moseley explained that “OBI, for the purposes of bewitching people, or consuming them by lingering illness, is made of grave dirt, hair, teeth of sharks, and other creatures, blood, feathers, egg-shells, images in wax.”¹⁹

Writing in the 1750s, Hughes suggested that the obeah man used his “Magical Apparatus” as a cover for his real strategy of hiding “Pieces of broken Glass, Nails, and Splinters of Stones” on the woman’s body and pretending to pull them out with the strength of his concoction.²⁰ For Hughes, obeah entailed using various material objects to deceive one’s patients; the true source of obeah’s power was the woman’s mind or imagination, which was convinced first that she was ill and second that the obeah man had successfully cured her. Interestingly, by the 1790s when Edwards and Moseley were writing, accounts of the process with which obeah practitioners deceived patients had all but disappeared from colonial reports, leaving only the list of the materials in the obeah man’s magical apparatus. Colonists’ focus on the objects in obeah practitioners’ apparatuses can be seen as enacting the empiricist principle that nature could be known by a close and careful examination of things themselves. Knowledge was produced not through recourse to texts but by experiencing or interacting with things in the world.²¹ The lists in colonial texts attempt to make obeah into something that readers can sense, observe, and thus convert into knowledge, and these lists further suggest that obeah’s causes are available through an observation of its materials. However, far from demystifying obeah, the texts attest to the ways in which obeah exceeds empiricism: as the examples above show, the lists do not uncover obeah’s hidden natural causes but instead display something of how obeah’s power works, that is, how the objects that constitute obeah have a power that exceeds their individual parts. Considering the “grave dirt, hair, teeth of sharks, and other creatures, blood, feathers, egg-shells, images in wax” was unlikely to lead observers to any conclusions about obeah’s natural causes.²² Instead, these textual collections mirrored the process whereby obeah practitioners gathered objects into mixtures whose power exceeded the sum of their parts and that drew on both natural and supernatural worlds for their efficacy. Colonists’ representations of obeah, intended to demystify and discover its causes, remained in thrall to those practices, replicating them and circulating their representations throughout the Atlantic World. Indeed, as J. Alexandra McGhee shows in her article, obeah could “infect” colonial minds, texts, and performances, and these representations of obeah highlighted concerns about the effects of tropical climates on colonial bodies and minds and about the difficulties of maintaining order on plantations. Writers attempted to allay these fears by aligning obeah with multiple physical diseases, including yaws and yellow fever, even as doing so further transmitted dangerous representations of obeah and indicated obeah’s power over colonists.

Colonists’ failure to locate obeah’s natural causes is manifested formally, in hybrid texts whose generic mixtures reflect the assemblages out of which obeah was constituted – its collections of natural objects, chants, “jargon,” and ceremonies.²³ In The Sugar-Cane, for example, Grainger added scientific footnotes to his poetic text, in which he stated that obeah men carried a staff marked with “frogs, snakes, & c. The blacks imagine that its blow, if not mortal, will at least occasion long and troublesome disorders.”²⁴ Grainger attributed the power of the obeah man’s staff to Africans’ “belief in magic,” thus contradicting his poetic description of obeah as composed of natural and supernatural elements to support instead the argument that obeah’s powers could be attributed to Africans’ imaginations. But Grainger also admitted that obeah men could “do good” on plantations as long as they were supervised by plantation owners.²⁵ By placing prose footnotes that acknowledged obeah’s usefulness and that attributed it to Africans’ imaginations alongside his poetic list of obeah’s materials and description of their preternatural powers, Grainger formally represented the debate over obeah’s powers and the ways in which obeah escaped Euro-colonial epistemological categories. The poetic and scientific forms in The Sugar-Cane register colonists’ attempts to discover obeah’s natural causes and to categorize obeah as irrational knowledge that preyed on unsuspecting or naïve Africans even as these forms also represent colonists’ recognition that obeah was a powerful, valuable phenomena constituted out of mixtures of natural and preternatural powers.

Similarly, in his 1800 novel Obi: or the History of Three-Fingered Jack, William Earle mixed the form of the epistolary novel with footnotes, in order to represent multiple explanations of obeah’s powers. The novel depicts the capture and execution of an obeah man, and Earle inserted 11 pages of footnotes below the obeah man’s story.²⁶ These footnotes include a long description of obeah’s qualities copied from the accounts of historians Bryan Edwards and Edward Long. While the footnotes allow the narrative of Euro-colonial triumph over obeah to proceed undeterred, they also represent moments when colonists failed to categorize obeah or to explain it in terms of natural causes, thus introducing preternatural powers into the novel. In Earle’s novel, the obeah man is successfully captured and executed, and obeah is a practice that can be eradicated by killing its practitioners. However, in the footnotes, which recount instances in which colonists failed to control or explain obeah, it remains a power that exceeds and escapes colonial epistemologies, one that cannot be controlled by attending to natural causes. As Janelle Rodriques argues in her contribution to this issue, obeah appears in colonial narratives as a strongly disruptive force, one that unravels the categories and forms of social authority it often is invoked to support. Finally, we might see the novels in which obeah plays a key role, such as Maria Edgeworth’s gothic novel Belinda (1801) and romances such as Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826) and Cynric Williams’s Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827) as evidence of colonists’ failure to account for obeah in natural or civil histories or legal reports. As Tim Watson has pointed out, the “attempt to narrate the Caribbean from the point of view of plausibility, verifiability, and reason – realism, in other words – turns into the very forms it seeks to avoid: romantic narrative and its cognates, the gothic, the sentimental, and the melodrama.”²⁷ As obeah moved from medical treatises and natural histories into gothic novels and romances, its formal trajectory attested to colonists’ failure to locate natural causes for the forms of power they encountered in the Caribbean.

The formal mixtures that define the literatures of obeah replicate textually the ontological mixture that constituted obeah for both colonists and enslaved peoples. For colonists, combining poetic verses or the novel with footnotes allowed them to represent the confusing set of practices they confronted in obeah: the presence of objects with properties that could be identified in terms of natural causes alongside practices and powers that they categorized as preternatural. Africans’ bodies were central to these contests over power: as Jeffrey Cottrell’s contribution shows, colonial writers responded to the material practices and powers of African women’s bodies by imagining obeah as an increasingly powerful force and by developing ever more complex strategies for maintaining control over enslaved women’s bodies. As each text imagines the removal of obeah from the Caribbean, it both acknowledges obeah’s immense power and attempts to subordinate it by exercising control over African bodies. So, too, did writing about obeah offer colonial authors the chance to meditate on the vulnerability of white bodies; as Justine Murison demonstrates in this issue, representing obeah forced these writers to confront the conflicted relation between the disenchanted minds they imagined themselves to possess and the unsettling openness that marked the bodies of those inhabiting the pre-emancipation Caribbean world.

The literatures of obeah represent and recirculate, for their readers in Europe and for colonists in the Caribbean, some of those powers even as they seek to identify and categorize (and thus reduce) them. The power of obeah in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic World thus resided both in the natural and supernatural worlds that Africans accessed with material and spiritual practices and in the formal mixtures of colonial texts. Indeed, for colonists and for European readers, obeah’s power was located precisely in the assemblage of obeah practices and colonial representations of obeah – at a point that Stephan Palmié describes as “a singularly dense mesh of social praxis with its representation.”²⁸

Reading obeah

What, then, does it mean to try to account for obeah’s power in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic World, located as it is at the intersection of social practice and literary and cultural representation? Like other subaltern formations, obeah’s early history was largely chronicled in print by colonial writers,²⁹ many of whom had complex, limited, or frankly hostile relations to the practices they described.³⁰ Any attempt to access the social practices that colonial observers called “obeah,” then, has to contend with the limits of these source materials, the ways in which their “dense mesh” of practice and representation entangles historical fact in colonial fantasy. As Palmié puts it, “much of what our evidence actually tells us is that their masters or social superordinates (including anthropologists) strongly believed that slaves, peasants, and workers might believe in such things.”³¹ Seeking evidence of obeah in the historical record, in other words, scholars find instead a prototype of the colonial mind and the fears that animated it. This enmeshment of practice and representation enjoins those who would seek to trace obeah’s powers to adopt a radical modesty; since those who believed in and practiced obeah did so “in ways that largely escape the documentary record,”³² Palmié argues, one of the most important things we can learn about obeah is “what we, in fact, do not (and possibly cannot) know about it.”³³

We find ourselves in full and enthusiastic agreement with Palmié, and with others like him, in his insistence that we not take the source materials that record obeah’s presence in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic as transparent accounts of obeah practices or the beliefs that motivated them. Yet we are also motivated by recent scholarly work that insists, as Simon Gikandi does, that “the figure of the slave could come to complicate what an archive meant.”³⁴ As the founders of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive observe in their contribution to this issue, we must attend both to the knowledges these sources seek to create and the ones they seek to make inaccessible. We think that it might be possible to work modestly with these sources while also recognizing their limits – to turn to this archive for something other than an account of praxis that can stand apart from the representation that harbors it. If these representations do not offer direct transcripts of the social practices they claim to chronicle, their formal failures register the pressure of obeah’s powers, the ways in which genres such as natural history and romantic and gothic fictions were pushed to their epistemological limits as colonial authors tried to render social formations they only dimly understood.³⁵ Likewise, the fact remains that the source materials that remain for contemporary scholars also served as loci at which European, Caribbean, and American audiences came into relation with obeah and powers like it. As they read about obeah in medical treatises, newspaper articles, and chapbooks, or saw it travestied in pantomimes or cartoons, audiences throughout the Atlantic found their bodies assembled together with obeah’s unfamiliar powers, through the conduit of the medium that brought obeah to them. Holding a newspaper or a chapbook in their hands, or joining the audience of one of the pantomimes that told of slave revolutions fueled by obeah rituals, readers and viewers opened themselves, if only for a moment, to experiencing obeah as part of the material world in which they read and that they shared with others.³⁶ Obeah may have been something they rejected or accepted, something to which they turned for practical knowledge of West Indies life or simply for gothic amusement, but in each of these cases coming to know it meant enacting the habits and postures and behaviors that fit newspapers and pantomimes into their worlds. If these sources can never give us obeah practices in pure, unadulterated form – obeah in its own right, in its intimate connection to the historical actors who used it, revised it, and believed in it – what they may offer us is a portrait of how those practices and beliefs registered within the Atlantic World, of the entanglements and affiliations that grew up around them. We can find in these sources, in other words, the outlines of the assemblages they sought to generate – the felt texture of the common world into which they imagined readers, colonial authorities, and obeah practices and practitioners.³⁷

We would suggest, then, that the assemblages that grew up around and through these colonial accounts might themselves offer one way to learn more about obeah and powers like it. Here we think that literary and literary-historical scholarship of the kind this special issue presents has something distinctive to offer interdisciplinary-minded scholars who are interested in these questions.³⁸ Our turn in this direction is motivated, at least in part, by the by now well-recognized asymmetries between historians’ and literary scholars’ treatment of each other's’ work. Eric Slauter has argued that the differences between literary scholars and historians – and, in recent years, the willingness of literary scholars to cite historians compared to the general paucity of citations from historians to literary scholars, a differential he terms the “trade gap” – depend at least in part on a differing approach to source materials (they historicize different things). Yet Elizabeth Maddock Dillon insists that what’s really at play here is “a large area of noncoincidence between the aims and desires of literary studies and historical studies,” one that focuses literary scholars’ attention on “an essential aspect of the community generated by the advent of an Atlantic World: namely a set of signifying practices (and erasures) that shaped the world we inhabit today.”³⁹ Dillon’s insistence on the primary concern of literary scholars with aesthetics – in particular, with “the analysis of form and genre” – registers her insistence on two twinned principles: that the political realm in which we come to live together is strongly shaped by signifying practices, and that literary scholars are particularly well positioned to explain these practices’ power and significance.⁴⁰ For Dillon, as for many other literary scholars, the structures and patterns that guide representation matter because they shape the terms on which people sensed and perceived the world they shared in common, the sites at which they could become social beings. As Cindy Weinstein and Chris Looby put it: “aesthetic [becomes] a usable term precisely because its history involves the discipline of a careful attention to surfaces and appearances, to the sensible textures of things, and its history also preserves the conviction that social and political life always has a sensory and perceptual dimension.”⁴¹

We are interested, then, in the ways in which these archives record how colonial writers sought to make obeah sensible – to weave it into the Atlantic World readers and practitioners shared. Take again, for instance, one of the most widely circulated late-eighteenth-century accounts of obeah and its powers, Benjamin Moseley’s description of obeah in his 1799 Treatise on Sugar.⁴² As we discuss above, Moseley’s account offers a classic representation of obeah-as-assemblage, listing the ostensibly natural objects that an obeah might contain and making visible the ways in which obeah’s powers confound empiricist modes of observation. Moseley’s text also, and paradoxically, opens up the possibility that we can see how colonial authors sought to orient their readerships to the phenomenon they were describing – the way that the tenuous project of making obeah knowable, with all its limits, also sought to teach audiences how to understand how obeah figured into the world in which they lived. Here is the full passage in which Moseley’s list of an obeah’s contents appears:

OBI, for the purposes of bewitching people, or consuming them by lingering illness, is made of grave dirt, hair, teeth of sharks, and other creatures, blood, feathers, egg-shells, images in wax, the hearts of birds, and some potent roots, weeds, and bushes, of which Europeans are at this time ignorant; but which were known, for the same purposes, to the ancients.

Certain mixtures of these ingredients are burnt; or buried very deep in the ground; or hung up a chimney; or laid under the threshold of the door of the party, to suffer; with incantation songs, or curses, performed at midnight, regarding the aspects of the moon … A negro, who thinks himself bewitched by OBI, will apply to an Obi-man, or Obi-woman, for cure. […]

I saw the OBI of the famous negro robber, Three fingered JACK, the terror of Jamaica in 1780 and 1781. […] His OBI consisted of the end of a goat’s horn, filled with a compound of grave dirt, ashes, the blood of a black cat, and human fat; all mixed into a kind of paste. A black cat’s foot, a dried toad, a pig’s tail, a slip of parchment of kid’s skin, with characters marked in blood on it, were also in his Obian bag.⁴³

Here we might observe, for instance, how Moseley’s narrative converts the closed, inaccessible assemblage that is Jack’s “Obian bag” into a pile of separate objects displayed to the reader’s view. Moseley’s account deliberately and strategically disaggregates these objects in order to bring them to the light. As the reader progresses through Moseley’s account, the careful assembly work done by an obeah practitioner gives way to the observer’s disassembly of the obeah’s contents, as he extracts each item one by one.⁴⁴ The obeah worker’s assemblage, in other words, is replaced by another assemblage – a list of the items that an obeah may enclose.

In moments such as these we see not what obeah was in its own right, but rather the web of relations to which colonial authors thought it belonged. Turning an eye toward these texts’ aesthetic properties shows how they seek to invest their audiences in what is, at its heart, an orienting project: one in which the powers that these texts struggle and sometimes fail to trace back to the natural world are still brought into their readers’ everyday lives in some form. When he lists the raw ingredients that compose an obeah, Moseley asks his readers to see the single objects he has extracted from it – a slip of parchment, an eggshell, a feather – as individual representatives of larger categories of familiar objects. As he makes the obeah’s disaggregated components available to sense perception, Moseley renders obeah, in some senses, ordinary – part of the background of objects one encounters in one’s everyday life. Yet mixed into these moments of recognition are a set of descriptions that cannot be directly verified through the senses: one has no way to know that what Moseley describes as “the blood of a black cat” came from a cat that was not brown or gray, or that it came from a cat at all. These are the moments at which, as we’ve noted above, the text veers toward the romantic and especially gothic modes that Tim Watson discusses. And they are the moments in which obeah’s recognizability as a part of the material world metropolitans and colonials shared relied both on the familiarity of material objects and the legibility of particular genres and tropes: the mythical powers of grave dirt, the magical efficacy of a black cat. Reading obeah, in other words, meant knowing it as a part of other stories, as something that could be recognized in the fictions and narratives that circulated in one’s culture. As they cross-pollinated obeah with the gothic, in particular, these texts aligned it with a cluster of possibly-real, possibly-imaginary dangers, horrors, and thrills that, when they appear in fictive texts, become at once part of how the world might be and something that might be imaginary, unreal. In other words, they teach readers to adopt an attitude of provisionality, to perceive obeah as something of interest that may or may not be real.

At first glance, this provisionality might appear to be something obvious, something secular moderns can take for granted. Yet here we do well to remember that the forms of recognition and orientation Moseley’s text chronicles had to be brought into being. And this, we think, is part of what a distinctively literary take on obeah may offer scholars interested in the legacy of these and other powers – a better understanding of the social formation and embodied orientations that grew up, tenuously and imperfectly, to try to integrate them into the Atlantic World. If we agree with Palmié that “the ‘other powers’ wielded by the subaltern other do not easily yield to ‘objective knowledge,’ unless the observer herself … agrees to come under its influence,” then one way we might begin to apprehend those powers is within the web of influences, literary and otherwise, that shaped those who would have encountered them in the past.⁴⁵ To do so may be to recognize, as the contributors to this special issue do, that our knowledge of obeah’s past may be a particularly entangled history – one in which praxis and representation can never stand fully apart.

Notes on contributors

Toni Wall Jaudon is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. Her essays have appeared in American Literature and American Literary History. Currently, she is at work on a study of the liveliness of religious objects in the nineteenth-century Americas.

Kelly Wisecup is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. She is the author of Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and the editor of “Good News from New England” by Edward Winslow: A Scholarly Edition (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

Acknowledgments

We thank the editors of Atlantic Studies for fostering and supporting this special issue, as well as Kelly Bezio, Tim Cassedy, Gabriel Cervantes, Nora Gilbert, Melissa Gniadek, Lucia Hodgson, Giffen Maupin, Dahlia Porter, Debapriya Sarkar, and Daniel Walden for their feedback on this introduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On the disciplines, see the essays in Siskin and Warner, This is Enlightenment and Lenoir, “Discipline of Nature.”

2. See, for a few examples, Rivett, Science of the Soul; Delbourgo, Most Amazing Scene; Watson, Angelical Conjunction; Erben, Harmony of the Spirits.

3. See Sweet, Domingos Álvares. For a compelling introduction to current scholarly work on these intersections, see “Religion and Medicine in American Literature,” a recent special issue of Literature and Medicine coedited by Kelly Bezio and Ashley Reed.

4. See Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, especially 50, as well as Epstein, Scandal of Colonial Rule and Joseph, Reading the East India Company.

5. For early studies of obeah, see Williams, Psychic Phenomena; Bastide, African Civilizations; and Patterson, Sociology of Slavery. These scholars, to varying degrees, read colonial texts as capable of revealing accurate information about African belief and knowledge that could be fruitfully juxtaposed against European epistemological categories, from “religion,” to “witchcraft,” to “Africa.” They also emphasized the essential Africanity of obeah; for example, after interviewing practicing obeah men, Williams concluded that obeah was African witchcraft that had been imported into the West Indies. Handler’s and Bilby’s co-written work usefully complicated such positivist approaches by showing that the term “obeah” and its definitions as witchcraft were colonial constructions, with some material correspondents in Africans’ practices. See Handler and Bilby, “On the Early Use” and “Obeah.” Their studies established the foundation for scholarship of the past decade or so, which has developed Handler’s and Bilby’s methodological skepticism of colonial texts to examine the ways in which colonial accounts of obeah served larger social, aesthetic, and legal aims. See, for example, Aravamudan, “Introduction”; and Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo”; Watson, Caribbean Culture; Paton, “Witchcraft, Law, Poison”; the essays in Paton and Forde, Obeah and Other Powers; and Browne, “‘Bad Business’ of Obeah.”

6. Stewart, Three Eyes, 42.

7. Stewart, Three Eyes, 103–104.

8. Handler and Bilby, “On the Early Use,” 87.

9. See Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law.”

10. Daston, “Marvelous Facts,” 107.

11. See Daston, “Marvelous Facts,” 107.

12. See Brown, Reaper’s Garden, and Wisecup, “Knowing Obeah.”

13. Long, History of Jamaica, 416.

14. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, IV.384–386.

15. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, IV.387–392.

16. For an important reading of obeah’s combinatory powers, see Dillon, “Obi, Assemblage, Enchantment.”

17. Hughes, Natural History, 15.

18. Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, 87.

19. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 171.

20. Hughes, Natural History, 15.

21. See Mack, “Horace Walpole.”

22. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 171.

23. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, IV.392.

24. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 143–144.

25. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 144.

26. See Earle, Obi, 72. The Broadview edition omits some of Earle's original footnotes; scholars interested in these should consult the 1800 London edition (published by Earle and Hemet) or the 1804 Worcester edition (published by Isaiah Thomas).

27. Watson, Caribbean Culture, 6.

28. Palmié, “Other Powers,” 317.

29. Discussions of obeah could be found in colonial histories, medical treatises, governmental documents, and missionary writings, many of which circulated in excerpted forms in newspapers, novels, and chapbooks and served as the basis for fictional and theatrical works about obeah in the colonies. Many of these discussions figured within larger accounts of the escaped slave turned bandit Jack Mansong; for a detailed survey of the many iterations of Jack’s story, see Paton, “The Afterlives of Three-Fingered Jack.” Srinivas Aravamudan’s introduction to William Earle’s Obi (Broadview Press, 2008) also offers an extensive overview of literary accounts of obeah. Diana Paton’s online archive Obeah Histories (www.obeahhistories.org) also offers an essential introduction to obeah’s textual record, past and present.

30. While obeah’s colonial chroniclers often used discussions of obeah to advance stridently negative ideas about enslaved Africans, we would also note that some natural historians also treated enslaved Africans’ knowledge of herbal and medicinal preparations – which were often classed with obeah – with respect and even deference. Colonial dismissals of obeah took multiple and varied forms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from knowing dismissal of enslaved Africans’ supposed credulity, to panicked fear of a well-camouflaged poison, to open respect for what Susan Scott Parrish describes as “the slave fully initiated into the secrets of nature,” persons who could skillfully negotiate the West Indies’ natural and sometimes supernatural worlds. See Parrish, American Curiosity, 262.

31. Palmié, “Other Powers,” 326.

32. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 326.

33. Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 333.

34. Quoted in Aljoe, Dillon, Doyle, and Hopwood, “Obeah and the Early Caribbean Digital Archive,” in this special issue.

35. Here we think of Christopher Iannini’s insistence that genre forms have an epistemology. See Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 23–25.

36. Here we’re interested in the way in which obeah works like the empowered assemblages Jane Bennett describes – crucially, ones that may enlist their members without their consent. See Bennett, 21–22. We are aware, as well, that there are as many possible relations with texts (and pantomimes) as one can imagine uses; for one important account of the many misuses to which Britons put their books, see Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books. On this world-sharing, see Jaudon, “Obeah’s Sensations.”

37. Our thinking on this point has been spurred by the scholarly turn toward the new materialisms and actor-network theory, especially as it has figured in work by Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour. This second form of assemblage generated by the errand to write about obeah shares with Bennett’s assemblages the sense that its members might not be willingly enlisted (for instance, her suggestion that the agency of an assemblage might arise from “the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces”; see Vibrant Matter, 21), as it also follows Latour’s insistence that sociality consists in an ever-changing network of associations (see, for instance, Reassembling the Social).

38. Literary scholars who have written extensively about obeah include Srinivas Aravamudan, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Alan Richardson, Candace Ward, Tim Watson, and both of the editors of this special issue, among others.

39. Dillon, “Atlantic Practices,” 185.

40. Dillon, “Atlantic Practices,” 185.

41. Weinstein and Looby, “Introduction,” 8.

42. In addition to its appearance in the Jamaican newspaper The Royal Gazette and in multiple iterations of longer works published in London, excerpts of Moseley’s discussion of obeah appeared in newspapers in Boston (Boston Gazette, 26 March 1801), Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (The Gleaner, 21 January 1814), New York City (New-York Courier, 9 October 1816), Albany, New York (The Albany Advertiser, 12 October 1816), Washington, D.C. (Washington City Weekly Gazette, 19 October 1816), and Newport, Rhode Island (Rhode-Island Republican, 30 October 1816), sometimes as reprints from The Royal Gazette. See Carey and Paton, “Histories of Three-Fingered Jack” and Jaudon, “Obeah’s Sensations,” 737 n. 21.

43. Moseley, Treatise, 171–173.

44. Writing about the minkisi used among the BaKongo, Wyatt MacGaffey underscores how ritually empowered African objects garnered their force from deliberate processes of assemblage. See “African Objects,” especially 126, and “Fetishism Revisited,” 173. For an account of the cross-pollination between Kongo minkisi and conjuring practices among Atlantic Africans in the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry, see Young, “Minkisi”. Note also, however, the concerns Stephan Palmié raises about attempts to divine the African origins of the diverse and historically specific practices that evolved among enslaved Africans in the Americas (see, especially, the introduction to Africas of the Americas). What is clear from Moseley’s account is how deeply invested he was in disassembly as a way of working against the power that the obeah seemed to bear.

45. Palmié, “Other Powers,” 325.