Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

The historiography of witchcraft in the United States has long acknowledged the outsized role of the Tituba myth in the history of the Salem Witch Trials; however, few have pushed past the colonial northeast and Anglo-European women to critically examine how race, gender, religion, and slavery intersected to situate Black women as the most conspicuous alleged practitioners of “Black magic” in the US imagination. Drawing upon sources ranging from fifteenth-century accounts of western Africa to nineteenth-century US newspapers, “American Fetish” uses African and African-descended women’s encounters with practices termed “witchcraft” to argue for an expanded geographical, chronological, and racial narrative of the phenomenon in the United States. In this way, the project shows how religious categories like witchcraft structured gendered and racializing processes, rendering Black woman a legible category in the slavery era.