In many ways these two volumes are an enactment of the vision that Tracey Hucks and Dianne Stewart laid out ten years ago in the inaugural issue of Journal of African Religions in their article “Africana Religious Studies: Toward a Transdisciplinary Agenda in an Emerging Field.” Taking a phenomenological approach following Charles Long, as well as drawing on the methodologies of history and Africana theology, these dual studies of Orisha and obeah in Trinidad bring to life the internal diversity, complexity, and historical transformation of African diaspora cultures on the island.
The first volume is, and is not, about Obeah. Tracey Hucks began her and Stewart’s research in Trinidad trying to find evidence of Obeah, a mostly unspecified set of African diaspora ritual and healing repertoires now largely lost, denied, or forgotten. Instead, what she found evidence for was what the two authors call obeah (in the lower case), a...
University of California Press