Reviews for Sorcery in the Black Atlantic

The average rating for Sorcery in the Black Atlantic based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-09-23 00:00:00 Edith Williams The contributions to this volume are broadly concerned with questions of why and how beliefs in, and practices around, occult powers have survived - and, in some respects, proliferated - well into the era of 'Modernity' which had been predicted to sterilize such 'irrational' artifacts from the cultural imaginary of any society in which it established itself. The persistence of witchcraft accusations and their deadly consequences in a number of African states touched by, and now emerging from, the self-consciously modernizing colonial order is just one piece of evidence that the unilinear preconceptions of social evolution held by the engineers of the Enlightenment have not taken shape as projected. Indeed, the papers collected here are organized around the explicit understanding that the modern discourse in the postcolonial world about occult forces is a transatlantic phenomenon, not only a legacy of the historical slave trade, but also facilitated by the globalizing, universalizing exigencies of capitalist exchange and the boundary-rupturing nature of witchcraft itself. 'Discourse' is precisely the sense in which the supernatural is treated here, conveniently circumventing the question of its reality. We are dealing here with what people say and do /about/ the supernatural, primarily as this mediates in one way or another the social tensions generated by power differentials, often the result of novel developments or disruptions in socio-economic relations. The terms 'witchcraft', 'sorcery', and their semantic peers are generally not used consistently or systematically by the individual authors, let alone between them, but this is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that these words are mostly used to encompass conceptual categories which are themselves heterogeneous. Attempts are made at several points to address the ambiguity of these terms as etic labels, but any confusion is largely obviated by the focus of discussion on their antinomian, antisocial manifestations as objects of criminal accusation or the opponents of communal norms. The authors are, perhaps unfortunately, very consistent in their focus upon the social disruption, or at best resistance to institutional constraints, which occult discourse manifests. Some exploration of its more constructive and liberating possibilities would have been a welcome inclusion, and not thematically out of place. However, this omission, if it is one, does not detract from the valuable sociological insights which this volume does present.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-08-20 00:00:00 Edward Griffith I loved this collection of papers that covers a period from the early modern, when Portuguese trading posts were first established along the African coast, to the last decade. We get translations of the most current research from leading scholars in Brazil and Cuba. Sansi and Pares introduction is exceptional, addressing the concerns of the research area, the ways various historiographies have determined the direction of the field, and its renaissance that began in the 80's. They utilize the topics of each of the papers included in the volume to good illustrative purpose while also giving a sense of which may be of particular interest to you. Each paper is presented in more or less chronological order, which help understand the formative effect discourses of modernity have had upon our understanding of sorcery, particular those styles having an African origin. The utilization of Enlightenment narratives, both to purposes of white supremacy, normalizing slavery, and the stratification of class relations is examined. The geographical diversity represented here helps clarify that these processes and their effects are in no way straightforward, with very different results appearing between Angola, Brazil and Cuba. As a polytheist, Patricia Birman's piece "Sorcery, Territories and Marginal Resistances in Rio de Janeiro" was particularly distressing, as it records one woman's abandonment of her inherited Candomble practices, one of the last three in her neighborhood. This situated against two accounts of conversions to Pentecostalism, and an overview of Pentecostal strategies for capturing territories in RdJ supplied insights into what the historical process of Christian domination of European territories was probably like. Finally, it was deeply saddening to read an account of someone abandoning their Gods for reasons orthogonal to Christian activities, not caused by social threat or promises of community. As in any collection, some papers will be of more interest that others, but the editors maintained a unusual (in my experience) level of quality across all of their selections.