Sorcery in the Black Atlantic: The Occult Arts in Comparative Perspective

Three recent volumes—Pares and Sansi (eds.), Sorcery in the Black Atlantic; Paton and Forde (eds.), Obeah and Other Powers; and Sweet, Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World—set a new bar for scholarship about Caribbean and Latin American sorcery, stressing its contingency as well as its transnational and cosmopolitan aspects. Their richly contextualized case studies of African-derived practices related to illness and health, as well as the quotidian experience of slaves outside the plantation, challenge the most entrenched assumptions about sorcery and extend its use to a range of social actors, not just slaves. In the process, they serve to relocate the practice of sorcery in Latin America within a broad comparative framework that includes Europe and the Americas as well as Africa.