Archival Irruptions

In 1760, after the largest slave revolt in the 18th-century British Empire, colonial authorities criminalized the Afro-Caribbean practice of Obeah, branding it a “wicked Art.” Archival Irruptions uncovers the largely unknown history of Obeah before its criminalization. Using neglected multilingual archives, Gerbner reveals that Obeah was a prophetic practice of healing and resistance. She does so by offering a new method to recover repressed histories and challenge dominant narratives by reading for “irruptions”–narrative disruptions within colonial and missionary archives. This method not only redefines the story of Obeah but also offers a powerful tool for uncovering marginalized histories within imperial archives.

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Praise for Archival Irruptions

“This vital story captures the spirit of colonial Christianity. Reading through the selective observations and strategies of racial suppression employed to silence Africana religion, Katharine Gerbner’s engrossing narrative reveals how Black ways of knowing left indelible marks on the archive of Atlantic slavery. More than anything else I can remember, this book expands the way we must think about how authority, recognition, and disavowal shapes religious transformations.”

—Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

“In this groundbreaking book, Katharine Gerbner…provides a new starting point for theorizing Obeah historically and distilling its value to some of its original custodians of African descent. Archival Irruptions is a new model for how scholars can read colonial archives in order to update, complicate, and expand the historical narratives they construct about the past and make available to their readers.”

Archival Irruptions

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Praise for Archival Irruptions

—Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

—Dianne M. Stewart, author of Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad

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