Description: A study of the importance of debates about obeah, and state suppression of it, for Caribbean struggles about freedom and citizenship.
Brief description: Diana Paton has researched and taught Caribbean history for nearly twenty years. She studied at Warwick and Yale Universities, and between 2000-16 she was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and, since 2008, Reader in Caribbean History at Newcastle University. She currently holds the position of William Robertson Chair of History at the University of Edinburgh, where she moved to in 2016. Her widely cited first book, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (2004), was short-listed for the 2007 Elsa Goveia Prize of the Association of Caribbean Historians. Her article, 'Witchcraft, Poison, Law and Atlantic Slavery' won the Lester J. Cappon Award for the best article published in William and Mary Quarterly in 2012. She has also co-edited two collections of essays: Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (2005) and Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (2012). In 2014 she delivered the 30th Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture at the University of the West Indies, on 'Small Charges: Law and the Regulation of Conduct in the Post-Slavery Caribbean'. She is a former chair of the UK Society for Caribbean Studies and an editor of History Workshop Journal.
Review Quotes: "Paton takes a fresh approach to the study of black religion, examining the way obeah - as term and as practice - emerged amid the political tensions of slavery, state, and empire. With careful research, conceptual sophistication, and narrative force this book reveals the vital importance of African diaspora spiritual forms in the history of Atlantic political culture."
Vincent Brown, Harvard University, Massachusetts