Haunting Violence: Obeah and the Management of the Living and the Dead in Colonial Trinidad
by Alexander Rocklin (University of Chicago Divinity School; Martin Marty Center Jr. Fellow, 2012-13)
“This essay is an attempt to make sense of several scenes in the history of spirit worlds in Trinidad–the ways in which East Indians and their descendants were haunted by, and came to haunt, the island. It takes up ghost stories: stories of violence, violence that conjured ghosts, and violence that conjured histories of other violence, including histories of the transnational trade in unfree labor. This essay also looks at struggles against the violence perpetrated against the living and the dead in a colonial plantation society.”
Read Haunting Violence: Obeah and the Management of the Living and the Dead in Colonial Trinidad.
Read the invited responses from:
Lindsey Harlan (Connecticut College);
Paul Johnson (University of Michigan); and
Aisha Khan (New York University).
Image: National Museum, Trinidad