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Ritual Observance: Colonial Representations of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Practices in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century French Caribbean
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2017
Abstract
Over the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, colonial observers repeatedly recorded Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices in the French Caribbean. “Ritual Observances” charts four such records; the 1698 journal of Jean Baptiste Labat, trial records from 1784, Moreau de-Saint Merie’s 1794 Description Topographique, and Drouin De Bercy’s De Saint Domingue. Although these records span distinct historical periods and textual mediums, they all employ a set of recognizable forms to express the convergence of disgust and desire that have historically attended colonial observations of Afro-Caribbean agency. I argue, however, that the significance of this ambivalence is constitutive of the historical moment in which it appears and that these observations are connected by more than a “shared” ambivalence. Instead, we might categorize these records as themselves ritualistic. The term ritual observance gestures to the act of observing a ritual, but also the way in which the observation is itself ritualistic. The repeated and sequential forms, or “actions” as I term them, of the ritual observance work to inscribe a legible history over the turbulence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French colonialism.
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- General Articles
- Information
- Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 4 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Postcolonial Reading Publics , January 2017 , pp. 127 - 141
- Copyright
- © Cambridge University Press 2017
References
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