Obeah Race And Racism

Author : Eugenia O'Neal
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789766407599
Total Pages : 440 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Obeah, Race and Racism written by Eugenia O'Neal and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-24 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Obeah, Race and Racism, Eugenia O'Neal vividly discusses the tradition of African magic and witchcraft, traces its voyage across the Atlantic and its subsequent evolution on the plantations of the New World, and provides a detailed map of how English writers, poets and dramatists interpreted it for English audiences. The triangular trade in guns and baubles, enslaved Africans and gold, sugar and cotton was mirrored by a similar intellectual trade borne in the reports, accounts and stories that fed the perceptions and prejudices of everyone involved in the slave trade and no subject was more fascinating and disconcerting to Europeans than the religious beliefs of the people they had enslaved. Indeed, African magic made its own triangular voyage; starting from Africa, Obeah crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, then journeyed back across the ocean, in the form of traveller's narratives and plantation reports, to Great Britain where it was incorporated into the plots of scores of books and stories which went on to shape and form the world view of explorers and colonial officials in Britain's far-flung empire. O'Neal examines what British writers knew or thought they knew about Obeah and discusses how their perceptions of black people were shaped by their perceptions of Obeah. Translated or interpreted by racist writers as a devil-worshipping religion, Obeah came to symbolize the brutality, savagery and superstition in which blacks were thought to be immured by their very race. For many writers, black belief in Obeah proved black inferiority and justified both slavery and white colonial domination. The English reading public became generally convinced that Obeah was evil and that blacks were, at worst, devil worshippers or, at best, extremely stupid and credulous. And because books and stories on Obeah continued to promulgate either of the two prevailing perspectives, and sometimes both together until at least the 1950s, theories of black inferiority continue to hold sway in Great Britain today.

Author : Eugenia O'Neal
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789766407612
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book OBEAH, RACE AND RACISM;CARIBBEAN WITCHCRAFT IN THE ENGLISH IMAGINATION written by Eugenia O'Neal and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : J. Brent Crosson
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022670548X
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Experiments with Power written by J. Brent Crosson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2011, Trinidad declared a state of emergency. This massive state intervention lasted for 108 days and led to the rounding up of over 7,000 people in areas the state deemed “crime hot spots.” The government justified this action and subsequent police violence on the grounds that these measures were restoring “the rule of law.” In this milieu of expanded policing powers, protests occasioned by police violence against lower-class black people have often garnered little sympathy. But in an improbable turn of events, six officers involved in the shooting of three young people were charged with murder at the height of the state of emergency. To explain this, the host of Crime Watch, the nation’s most popular television show, alleged that there must be a special power at work: obeah. From eighteenth-century slave rebellions to contemporary responses to police brutality, Caribbean methods of problem-solving “spiritual work” have been criminalized under the label of “obeah.” Connected to a justice-making force, obeah remains a crime in many parts of the anglophone Caribbean. In Experiments with Power, J. Brent Crosson addresses the complex question of what obeah is. Redescribing obeah as “science” and “experiments,” Caribbean spiritual workers unsettle the moral and racial foundations of Western categories of religion. Based on more than a decade of conversations with spiritual workers during and after the state of emergency, this book shows how the reframing of religious practice as an experiment with power transforms conceptions of religion and law in modern nation-states.

Author : Aisha Khan
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674987829
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Deepest Dye written by Aisha Khan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How colonial categories of race and religion together created identities and hierarchies that today are vehicles for multicultural nationalism and social critique in the Caribbean and its diasporas. When the British Empire abolished slavery, Caribbean sugar plantation owners faced a labor shortage. To solve the problem, they imported indentured ÒcoolieÓ laborers, Hindus and a minority Muslim population from the Indian subcontinent. Indentureship continued from 1838 until its official end in 1917. The Deepest Dye begins on post-emancipation plantations in the West IndiesÑwhere Europeans, Indians, and Africans intermingled for work and worshipÑand ranges to present-day England, North America, and Trinidad, where colonial-era legacies endure in identities and hierarchies that still shape the post-independence Caribbean and its contemporary diasporas. Aisha Khan focuses on the contested religious practices of obeah and Hosay, which are racialized as ÒAfricanÓ and ÒIndianÓ despite the diversity of their participants. Obeah, a catch-all Caribbean term for sub-Saharan healing and divination traditions, was associated in colonial society with magic, slave insurrection, and fraud. This led to anti-obeah laws, some of which still remain in place. Hosay developed in the West Indies from Indian commemorations of the Islamic mourning ritual of Muharram. Although it received certain legal protections, HosayÕs mass gatherings, processions, and mock battles provoked fears of economic disruption and labor unrest that lead to criminalization by colonial powers. The proper observance of Hosay was debated among some historical Muslim communities and continues to be debated now. In a nuanced study of these two practices, Aisha Khan sheds light on power dynamics through religious and racial identities formed in the context of colonialism in the Atlantic world, and shows how today these identities reiterate inequalities as well as reinforce demands for justice and recognition.

Author : Diana Paton
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822351331
Total Pages : 373 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Obeah and Other Powers written by Diana Paton and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-13 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection looks at Caribbean religious history from the late 18th century to the present including obeah, vodou, santeria, candomble, and brujeria. The contributors examine how these religions have been affected by many forces including colonialism, law, race, gender, class, state power, media represenation, and the academy.

Author : Mervyn C. Alleyne
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789766401146
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World written by Mervyn C. Alleyne and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Ann Petry
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1504019873
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tituba of Salem Village written by Ann Petry and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young readers “will be carried along by the sheer excitement of the story” of 17th-century slavery and witchcraft by the million-copy selling author (The New York Times). In 1688, Tituba and her husband, John, are sold to a Boston minister and sent to the strange world of Salem, Massachusetts. Rumors about witches are spreading like wildfire throughout the state, filling the heads of Salem’s superstitious, God-fearing residents. When the reverend’s suggestible young daughter, Betsey, starts having fits, the townsfolk declare it to be the devil’s work. Suspicion falls on Tituba, who can read fortunes and spin flax into thread so fine it seems like magic. When suspicion turns to hatred, Tituba finds herself in grave danger. Will she be judged guilty of witchcraft and hanged? Loosely based on accounts of the period and trial transcripts, Ann Petry’s compelling historical novel draws readers into the hysteria of America’s deadly witch hunts.

Author : Margarite Fernández Olmos
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813523613
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sacred Possessions written by Margarite Fernández Olmos and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For review see: Joseph M. Murphy, in HAHR : The Hispanic American Historical Review, 78, 3 (August 1998); p. 495-496.

Author : Danielle N. Boaz
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271089628
Total Pages : 141 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Banning Black Gods written by Danielle N. Boaz and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-03-03 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Banning Black Gods is a global examination of the legal challenges faced by adherents of the most widely practiced African-derived religions in the twenty-first century, including Santeria/Lucumi, Haitian Vodou, Candomblé, Palo Mayombe, Umbanda, Islam, Rastafari, Obeah, and Voodoo. Examining court cases, laws, human rights reports, and related materials, Danielle N. Boaz argues that restrictions on African diaspora religious freedom constitute a unique and pervasive form of anti-Black discrimination. Emphasizing that these twenty-first-century cases and controversies are not a new phenomenon but rather a reemergence of colonial-era ideologies and patterns of racially motivated persecution, Boaz focuses each chapter on a particular challenge to Black religious freedom. She examines issues such as violence against devotees, restrictions on the ritual slaughter of animals, limitations on the custodial rights of parents, and judicial refusals to recognize these faiths as protected religions. Boaz introduces new issues that have never been considered as a question of religious freedom before—such as the right of Palo Mayombe devotees to possess remains of the dead—and she brings together controversies that have not been previously regarded as analogous, such as the right to wear headscarves and the right to wear dreadlocks in schools. Framing these issues in comparative perspective and focusing on transnational and transregional issues, Boaz advances our understanding of the larger human rights disputes that country-specific studies can overlook. Original and compelling, this important new book will be welcomed by students and scholars of African diaspora religions and discerning readers interested in learning more about the history of racial discrimination

Author : Rana A. Hogarth
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469632888
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Medicalizing Blackness written by Rana A. Hogarth and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery. Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.