ABSTRACT
In the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas, Obeah is the term used for a range of associated syncretic, African-derived religious and cultural beliefs and ritual practices that manipulate spiritual energy in order to effect material change. Obeah developed across Caribbean plantations as part of enslaved Africans’ responses to their capture, bondage and exile. Obeah, an alternative social, cultural and political rallying point for supposedly decultured African chattel, posed a credible enough threat to colonial order that not only was it violently outlawed, it became a metonym for the Caribbean ‘site of terror.’ Historical antipathy towards Obeah–a result of colonial strategies to devalue all things ‘African’ –has impeded comprehensive scholarship into the phenomenon. Literary criticism of Obeah has tended to focus on the early Caribbean, as evidenced by a 2015 special edition of Atlantic Studies addressing Obeah and its literatures up until the nineteenth century. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
