At the end of the trade: obeah and black women in the colonial imaginary

Abstract

Between the prohibition of the British slave trade in 1807 and slavery’s end in 1833, colonial agents increasingly turned their attention toward enslaved women and the particular ways these women might have utilized obeah practices to resist the theft of both their productive and reproductive labor. Scholars have explored how obeah presented a diverse and often difficult challenge for colonial administration after Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760. However, the relationship between women and obeah has not prominently figured in these studies. This article considers three texts produced between 1788 and 1820 to understand how colonial writers articulated the threat posed by obeah and enslaved women to colonial regulation over this roughly 30-year period. Stephen Fuller’s 1788 “Woman of the Popo Country” traces a relationship between gender and obeah but imagines obeah’s intervention in the colony solely in terms of its effect on productive labor. Drawing on the depictions of obeah as a revolutionary discourse, William Earle’s 1801 abolitionist text Obi; or the History of Three-Finger'd Jack produces a sympathetic black, male hero who comes into being through rejecting the obeah practiced by his mother. Finally, Dr. James Thomson’s 1820 text A Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes as They Occur in the Island of Jamaica understands obeah as a dangerous practice, particularly as it impacts both the productive and reproductive labor of enslaved women. In this way, these texts increasingly imagined obeah as an active participant in the colonial construction of gender that positioned women within an evolving system of biopolitical control. Representations of women are an integral component of obeah fictions and have contributed to the negative legacies associated with reified versions of black womanhood.