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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
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Obeah, Race and Racism - Caribbean Witchcraft in the English Imagination (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,378
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Obeah, Race and Racism - Caribbean Witchcraft in the English Imagination (Paperback)
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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.
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