February 24th
Dr. Kelly Wisecup (English, University of North Texas) will present“The Rites Ceremonies & Superstitions of their own Countries”: Race, Rebellion, & Medicine in British Atlantic .” British American colonists believed that several late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century slave rebellions were inspired by obeah, a mixture of African medical and religious knowledge. This talk will show how colonists gradually altered their accounts of obeah and rebellion to give them African–rather than American–origins, and to articulate differences between African and colonial minds and bodies. 