Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume I, Obeah

Tracey E. Hucks is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is the author of Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism.

Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. Analyzing their entangled histories and systems of devotion, Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stewart articulate how these religions were criminalized during slavery and colonialism yet still demonstrated autonomous modes of expression and self-defense. In Volume I, Obeah, Hucks traces the history of African religious repression in colonial Trinidad through the late nineteenth century. Drawing on sources ranging from colonial records, laws, and legal transcripts to travel diaries, literary fiction, and written correspondence, she documents the persecution and violent penalization of African religious practices encoded under the legal classification of "obeah." A cult of antiblack fixation emerged as white settlers defined themselves in opposition to Obeah, which they imagined as terrifying African witchcraft. These preoccupations revealed the fears that bound whites to one another. At the same time, persons accused of obeah sought legal vindication and marshaled their own spiritual and medicinal technologies to fortify the cultural heritages, religious identities, and life systems of African-diasporic communities in Trinidad.

Preface  ix Acknowledgments  xv Introduction to Volume I  1 1. The Formation of a Slave Colony: Race, Nation, and Identity  13 2. Let Them Hate So Long as They Fear: Obeah Trials and Social Cannibalism in Trinidad’s Early Slave Society  52 3. Obeah, Piety, and Poison in The Slave Son: Representations of African Religions in Trinidadian Colonial Literature  104 4. Marked in the Genuine African Way: Liberated Africans and Obeah Doctoring in Postslavery Trinidad  141 Afterword. C’est Vrai—It Is True  203 Notes  209 Bibliography  241 Index  253