Description: Katharine Gerbner traces how British colonial authorities in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica came to criminalize Obeah, a religious practice held by enslaved Africans.
Review Quotes: "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 develops an account of the experiences, beliefs, thoughts, and decisions of enslaved Africans in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica. Her definitive research 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."--Dianne M. Stewart, author of, Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa "Archival Irruptions should not be viewed merely as a new study of an eighteenth-century Jamaican plantation based on fresh archival sources. Rather, it serves as a practical demonstration of a critical approach to colonial documents, addressing common risks while resolutely aiming to avoid the 'repetition of epistemic violence of our archives'."--Pedro Luengo, Ethnic and Racial Studies