Katharine Gerbner, "Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica" (Duke UP, 2025)

New Books in African American Studies · Mar 23, 2026 · 57m

In 1760, following the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Empire, the Afro-Caribbean word Obeah first appeared in British colonial law. In Archival Irruptions, Katharine Gerbner traces how British authorities in Jamaica came to criminalize Obeah, a practice that was variously seen as a healing method, an Africana religion, a science, and a form of witchcraft. Gerbner shows that in the years directly preceding its criminalization, for enslaved Africans and Maroons, Obeah was a prophetic practice tied to healing and death rites. Drawing on Moravian missionary archives…