Conjuring power in Caribbean and African-American literature (Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Wilson Harris, Charles Johnson, Erna Brodber, Toni Morrison, Jamaica, Guyana)

What is the role of folk religion in Caribbean and African-American literature? To contemporary Caribbean and African-American writers, as to none before, magico-religious practices can inspire writers to depict, explore, and challenge power relations between colonizer and colonized, men and women, whites and blacks. Not all writers see in folk religions positive poetic potential; however, this dissertation focuses on authors who turn to magico-religious practices in order to fashion counter-discourses to dominant ideologies.; The dissertation's argument takes a two-pronged, interdisciplinary approach to the study of folk religions. It turns first to the cultural study of magico-religious practices in order to ground the study of resistance in history and to tailor its analysis specifically to the differences of the Caribbean and African America. Deploying postcolonial concepts of resistance articulated by theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, I trace a variety of meanings about magical practices created by dominant Eurocentric ideologies and subordinated slave communities. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Eurocentric groups, for example, created meanings about West African religions that entrenched their own sense of superiority and furthered the development of colonialist assumptions about self and other. Antebellum slave communities, however, created meanings about magico-religious practices that provided subordinated "others" with a sense of power. Malleable, fickle, and ambivalent, the magico-religious practices of folk religions such as Vodun, Myal, Obeah, Revival, and Hoodoo prove to be particularly suggestive and imaginatively provocative, as they are syncretic practices that can be used as curse or blessing, violence or healing, oppression or resistance.; Following its historical analysis of folk religions, the dissertation then maps the literary development of depictions of magico-religious practices in the twentieth century. Tracing the cumulative development from early twentieth-century black literature to contemporary writing, this study analyzes Claude McKay's A Long Way From Home, Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Erna Brodber's Myal, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. It argues that the representation of magico-religious practices has moved cumulatively through three incarnations---as writing, as history, and as gender---to become transformed into a modality of magical writing by contemporary Caribbean and African-American women writers.