An innovative history of the politics and practice of the Caribbean spiritual healing techniques known as obeah and their place in everyday life in the region. Spanning two centuries, the book results from extensive research on the development and implementation of anti-obeah legislation. It includes analysis of hundreds of prosecutions for obeah, and an account of the complex and multiple political meanings of obeah in Caribbean societies. Diana Paton moves beyond attempts to define and describe what obeah was, instead showing the political imperatives that often drove interpretations and discussions of it. She shows that representations of obeah were entangled with key moments in Caribbean history, from eighteenth-century slave rebellions to the formation of new nations after independence. Obeah was at the same time a crucial symbol of the Caribbean's alleged lack of modernity, a site of fear and anxiety, and a thoroughly modern and transnational practice of healing itself.

This book provides critical perspectives on the multiple forms of 'mothering' that took place in Atlantic slave societies. Facing repeated child death, mothering was a site of trauma and grief for many, even as slaveholders romanticized enslaved women's work in caring for slaveholders' children. Examining a wide range of societies including medieval Spain, Brazil, and New England, and including the work of historians based in Brazil, Cuba, the United States, and Britain, this collection breaks new ground in demonstrating the importance of mothering for the perpetuation of slavery, and the complexity of the experience of motherhood in such circumstances. This pathbreaking collection, on all aspects of the experience, politics, and representations of motherhood under Atlantic slavery, analyses societies across the Atlantic world, and will be of interest to those studying the history of slavery as well as those studying mothering throughout history. This book comprises two special issues, originally published in Slavery & Abolition and Women's History Review.

An innovative history of the politics and practice of the Caribbean spiritual healing techniques known as obeah and their place in everyday life in the region. Spanning two centuries, the book results from extensive research on the development and implementation of anti-obeah legislation. It includes analysis of hundreds of prosecutions for obeah, and an account of the complex and multiple political meanings of obeah in Caribbean societies. Diana Paton moves beyond attempts to define and describe what obeah was, instead showing the political imperatives that often drove interpretations and discussions of it. She shows that representations of obeah were entangled with key moments in Caribbean history, from eighteenth-century slave rebellions to the formation of new nations after independence. Obeah was at the same time a crucial symbol of the Caribbean's alleged lack of modernity, a site of fear and anxiety, and a thoroughly modern and transnational practice of healing itself.

This book provides critical perspectives on the multiple forms of 'mothering' that took place in Atlantic slave societies. Facing repeated child death, mothering was a site of trauma and grief for many, even as slaveholders romanticized enslaved women's work in caring for slaveholders' children. Examining a wide range of societies including medieval Spain, Brazil, and New England, and including the work of historians based in Brazil, Cuba, the United States, and Britain, this collection breaks new ground in demonstrating the importance of mothering for the perpetuation of slavery, and the complexity of the experience of motherhood in such circumstances. This pathbreaking collection, on all aspects of the experience, politics, and representations of motherhood under Atlantic slavery, analyses societies across the Atlantic world, and will be of interest to those studying the history of slavery as well as those studying mothering throughout history. This book comprises two special issues, originally published in Slavery & Abolition and Women's History Review.

From Miss Lou to Bob Marley and Usain Bolt to Kamala Harris, Jamaica has had an outsized reach in global mainstream culture. Yet many of its most important historical, cultural, and political events and aspects are largely unknown beyond the island. The Jamaica Reader presents a panoramic history of the country, from its precontact indigenous origins to the present. Combining more than one hundred classic and lesser-known texts that include journalism, lyrics, memoir, and poetry, the Reader showcases myriad voices from over the centuries: the earliest published black writer in the English-speaking world; contemporary dancehall artists; Marcus Garvey; and anonymous migrant workers. It illuminates the complexities of Jamaica's past, addressing topics such as resistance to slavery, the modern tourist industry, the realities of urban life, and the struggle to find a national identity following independence in 1962. Throughout, it sketches how its residents and visitors have experienced and shaped its place in the world. Providing an unparalleled look at Jamaica's history, culture, and politics, this volume is an ideal companion for anyone interested in learning about this magnetic and dynamic nation.

This book brings back into print, for the first time since the 1830s, a text that was central to the transatlantic campaign to fully abolish slavery in Britain's colonies. James Williams, an eighteen-year-old Jamaican "apprentice" (former slave), came to Britain in 1837 at the instigation of the abolitionist Joseph Sturge. The "Narrative" he produced there, one of very few autobiographical texts by Caribbean slaves or former slaves, became one of the most powerful abolitionist tools for effecting the immediate end to the system of apprenticeship that had replaced slavery.
Describing the hard working conditions on plantations and the harsh treatment of apprentices unjustly incarcerated, Williams argues that apprenticeship actually worsened the conditions of Jamaican ex-slaves: former owners, no longer legally permitted to directly punish their workers, used the Jamaican legal system as a punitive lever against them. Williams's story documents the collaboration of local magistrates in this practice, wherein apprentices were routinely jailed and beaten for both real and imaginary infractions of the apprenticeship regulations.
In addition to the complete text of Williams's original "Narrative, " this fully annotated edition includes nineteenth-century responses to the controversy from the British and Jamaican press, as well as extensive testimony from the Commission of Enquiry that heard evidence regarding the "Narrative's" claims. These fascinating and revealing documents constitute the largest extant body of direct testimony by Caribbean slaves or apprentices.

From Miss Lou to Bob Marley and Usain Bolt to Kamala Harris, Jamaica has had an outsized reach in global mainstream culture. Yet many of its most important historical, cultural, and political events and aspects are largely unknown beyond the island. The Jamaica Reader presents a panoramic history of the country, from its precontact indigenous origins to the present. Combining more than one hundred classic and lesser-known texts that include journalism, lyrics, memoir, and poetry, the Reader showcases myriad voices from over the centuries: the earliest published black writer in the English-speaking world; contemporary dancehall artists; Marcus Garvey; and anonymous migrant workers. It illuminates the complexities of Jamaica's past, addressing topics such as resistance to slavery, the modern tourist industry, the realities of urban life, and the struggle to find a national identity following independence in 1962. Throughout, it sketches how its residents and visitors have experienced and shaped its place in the world. Providing an unparalleled look at Jamaica's history, culture, and politics, this volume is an ideal companion for anyone interested in learning about this magnetic and dynamic nation.

In Obeah and Other Powers, historians and anthropologists consider how marginalized spiritual traditions-such as obeah, Vodou, and Santeria-have been understood and represented across the Caribbean since the seventeenth century. In essays focused on Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the wider Anglophone Caribbean, the contributors explore the fields of power within which Caribbean religions have been produced, modified, appropriated, and policed. The "other powers" of the book's title have helped to shape, or attempted to curtail, Caribbean religions and healing practices. These powers include those of capital and colonialism; of states that criminalize some practices and legitimize others; of occupying armies that rewrite constitutions and reorient economies; of writers, filmmakers, and scholars who represent Caribbean practices both to those with little knowledge of the region and to those who live there; and, not least, of the millions of people in the Caribbean whose relationships with one another, as well as with capital and the state, have long been mediated and experienced through religious formations and discourses. Contributors. Kenneth Bilby, Erna Brodber, Alejandra Bronfman, Elizabeth Cooper, Maarit Forde, Stephan Palmie, Diana Paton, Alasdair Pettinger, Lara Putnam, Karen Richman, Raquel Romberg, John Savage, Katherine Smith

Investigating the cultural, social, and political histories of punishment during ninety years surrounding the 1838 abolition of slavery in Jamaica, Diana Paton challenges standard historiographies of slavery and discipline. The abolition of slavery in Jamaica, as elsewhere, entailed the termination of slaveholders' legal right to use violence--which they defined as "punishment"--against those they had held as slaves. Paton argues that, while slave emancipation involved major changes in the organization and representation of punishment, there was no straightforward transition from corporal punishment to the prison or from privately inflicted to state-controlled punishment. Contesting the dichotomous understanding of pre-modern and modern modes of power that currently dominates the historiography of punishment, she offers critical readings of influential theories of power and resistance, including those of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Ranajit Guha.

"No Bond but the Law" reveals the longstanding and intimate relationship between state formation and private punishment. The construction of a dense, state-organized system of prisons began not with emancipation but at the peak of slave-based wealth in Jamaica, in the 1780s. Jamaica provided the paradigmatic case for British observers imagining and evaluating the emancipation process. Paton's analysis moves between imperial processes on the one hand and Jamaican specificities on the other, within a framework comparing developments regarding punishment in Jamaica with those in the U.S. South and elsewhere. Emphasizing the gendered nature of penal policy and practice throughout the emancipation period, Paton is attentive to the ways in which the actions of ordinary Jamaicans and, in particular, of women prisoners, shaped state decisions.