Another excellent new book that we have recently indexed at Southwest Humanities is Katherine Gerbner’s essential monograph, Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025). In Archival Irruptions, Gerbner investigates how the colonial authorities in eighteenth-century Jamaica came to define, classify, and criminalize Obeah—a set of spiritual/healing practices among enslaved Africans and Maroons—as they responded to social unrest. Key to this is the 1760 slave revolt, after which “Obeah” first entered British colonial law. Through missionary sources (especially Moravian archives) and colonial judicial records, Gerbner reconstructs how Obeah was understood variably as religion, witchcraft, healing art, or “science.” She shows how Africana beliefs and ritual practices—through prophetic speech, death-rites, blood oaths, and community care—irrupted through colonial archival materials, meaning they broke into or disturbed the colonial narrative, exposing gaps, tensions, and resistance. The book not only maps how colonial power attempted to silence and suppress Obeah, but also recovers how Obeah practitioners themselves lived, believed, and acted in ways that challenged colonial norms. Archival Irruptions not only offers a richly documented history of Obeah’s colonial criminalization, but it also offers a promising model for doing history from the margins—paying attention to how marginalized belief systems “erupt” from archival constraints. It will be of interest to scholars working on religion, colonialism, law, Black Atlantic history, and the theory of the archive. For more information, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 