The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World by Aisha Khan

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World by Aisha Khan Rupa Pillai The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World. By Aisha Khan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021. In her latest book, The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World, cultural anthropologist Aisha Khan does more than provide a fascinating study of Obeah and Hosay. She illustrates how categories produced through colonialism continue to shape identities and hierarchies today. To accomplish this, Khan focuses her analysis on race and religion, identity categories she expertly demonstrates are mutually constituted. By pursuing this analysis through a parallax view, "the effect by which the position of an object seems to change when it is looked at from different positions," she challenges the reader to recognize that the mutual constitutions of race and religion vary across time and space (14). In fact, no categories are ever stable, they are always in process, prompting Khan to advocate that any category or identity should be studied in relation to others. Over four chapters, Khan offers a richly diverse body of evidence to support her argument. The brilliance of Khan's analysis lies in her comparative study of Obeah and Hosay, contested religious practices in the Anglophone Caribbean. While Obeah and Hosay have been extensively studied, Khan's contribution is in examining the practices in a manner that highlights the essentialized assumptions of previous studies, namely that Obeah is a solely African tradition and Hosay is a solely Indian tradition. Previous studies also primarily examine each practice in isolation, rarely considering how Obeah is related to Hosay. To showcase how they are connected, Khan's first two chapters excavate the substantial colonial archive of journals, reports, and court proceedings to illuminate how the binary of African/Indian emerges in the Caribbean through the policing of these practices. For instance, Hosay, an adapted practice of Muharram, a mourning ritual that originated in today's Middle East and traveled to the South Asian subcontinent before arriving in the Caribbean through indentured migration, is essentialized as exclusively Indian through colonial policing. Khan points out how colonial officials criminalize activities such as African participation in Hosay by arguing non-Indian participation in Hosay as not genuine Islam. Thus, the colonial concerns of multi-racial solidarity that prompt such criminalization are hidden by claims of protecting the religious freedom of indentured Indians. Similar policing of Obeah contributed to producing norms about Africans and Indians in the colonial Caribbean. Drawing upon ethnographic research and close readings of art, Khan continues in the next two chapters to examine how these norms persist and are reworked in the Caribbean and its diaspora. From the visibility of Hosay in Trinidad to an examination of the representation of Obeah in the Netflix series Luke Cage, Khan shows how colonial understandings of the practices shape contemporary understandings of Obeah and Hosay. A strength of these chapters is Khan's ability to illustrate how different actors utilize essentialized understandings of Hosay and Obeah to pursue goals, such as claiming resources and protection, within the multi-cultural nation states of Trinidad and Canada. For example, Khan discusses two cases in Canada where Obeah was used for entrapment to consider "what kind of belief is required to be deemed legitimately religious […] and […] the particular vulnerability of certain racial communities to state harassment and injustice" (124). The convicted individuals of this type of entrapment were unsuccessful in arguing for religious protection, illustrating how religious and racial minorities are targeted based on standards established by mid-nineteenth century Euro-colonial thought. While the two chapters on contemporary materials may lack the easily recognizable connections that the first two chapters have, Khan's concluding chapter addresses any confusions a reader might have. In providing a helpful review of her goals in the book, Khan deftly gathers any loose ends around her engagement with Hosay and Obeah. She is not arguing that they are identical practices, rather that it is "more interesting to think about how their differences work conjunctively to communicate ideas and ideologies about what types of people may be assumed to be carriers of what types of behaviors and practices...