Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1932369
L. Chude-Sokei
By now you must have grown tired of the easy poetics articulating racism and Covid-19 as “twin diseases” or dual pandemics; or perhaps as “mutual infections” or symbiotic viruses. Such talk has been rampant over the last year, suggesting a desire to link concurrent phenomena in the language of mutuality, of ongoing social illness or catalytic metastasis. It is also the case that in times when mundane reality faces the pressure of social contradiction as well as the hot breath of literal violence, metaphor becomes a way of containing the incommensurable and of expressing the inexpressible and the incomplete. Understandably this particular set of metaphors works in more direct ways. For example, they operate to delink these phenomena of racism and the pandemic from a state-sponsored narrative of pure happenstance or randomness, which renders them as opportunistic infections instead of chronic illnesses. Historians, however, are likely to flinch at this casual blending of phenomena given their awareness of a history in which race and cultural differences are ever framed in terms of infections, disease and contagion. A notable example of this would be how Chinese immigrants were linked to the “miasmic theory” of disease or germ transmission in the nineteenth century and so everything from smallpox to “Mongolian leprosy” to cholera and typhus became reasons to restrict immigration from Asian countries as the country would in 1924. Of course, that particular reading of race and disease has not left us, indeed it was barely dormant before being violently relaunched by the antiChina, anti-immigrant virus of Trumpism. It is this latter reawakening of the deployment of the two phenomena that should alert those of us in/around Black Studies that it is more than a predictable and exhausted collusion of symbols and metaphors. They are enduring elements in the arsenal of moral panic and racial power. This poetic parallel is worth some attention, though, not for what it assumes but for what it can do. Such easy synthesis can do more than just allow narratives to authorize themselves around tropes of illness, foreignness and of cultural influence framed as moral contagion—as mentioned above, these associations are historically quite familiar. Yet even if we now blend racism and disease in putatively anti-racist ways, such as to point out what has long been chronic about white supremacism and, for example, how it and healthcare are no strange bedfellows, the ease with which we do so depends on the former legacy of rendering race and infection equivalent. But that’s a minor quibble. Far more troublesome is how powerful the poetic parallel can be in mobilizing a depleted and ravaged body to generate enthusiastic if not cathartic response. In other words, far more dangerous is the promise of a cure. Let me be extremely clear before being suspected of Coronavirus denialism or of being an anti-vaxxer. It’s the other side of the parallel I’m thinking about here—the par
{"title":"Vaccines, Antidotes, Cures","authors":"L. Chude-Sokei","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1932369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1932369","url":null,"abstract":"By now you must have grown tired of the easy poetics articulating racism and Covid-19 as “twin diseases” or dual pandemics; or perhaps as “mutual infections” or symbiotic viruses. Such talk has been rampant over the last year, suggesting a desire to link concurrent phenomena in the language of mutuality, of ongoing social illness or catalytic metastasis. It is also the case that in times when mundane reality faces the pressure of social contradiction as well as the hot breath of literal violence, metaphor becomes a way of containing the incommensurable and of expressing the inexpressible and the incomplete. Understandably this particular set of metaphors works in more direct ways. For example, they operate to delink these phenomena of racism and the pandemic from a state-sponsored narrative of pure happenstance or randomness, which renders them as opportunistic infections instead of chronic illnesses. Historians, however, are likely to flinch at this casual blending of phenomena given their awareness of a history in which race and cultural differences are ever framed in terms of infections, disease and contagion. A notable example of this would be how Chinese immigrants were linked to the “miasmic theory” of disease or germ transmission in the nineteenth century and so everything from smallpox to “Mongolian leprosy” to cholera and typhus became reasons to restrict immigration from Asian countries as the country would in 1924. Of course, that particular reading of race and disease has not left us, indeed it was barely dormant before being violently relaunched by the antiChina, anti-immigrant virus of Trumpism. It is this latter reawakening of the deployment of the two phenomena that should alert those of us in/around Black Studies that it is more than a predictable and exhausted collusion of symbols and metaphors. They are enduring elements in the arsenal of moral panic and racial power. This poetic parallel is worth some attention, though, not for what it assumes but for what it can do. Such easy synthesis can do more than just allow narratives to authorize themselves around tropes of illness, foreignness and of cultural influence framed as moral contagion—as mentioned above, these associations are historically quite familiar. Yet even if we now blend racism and disease in putatively anti-racist ways, such as to point out what has long been chronic about white supremacism and, for example, how it and healthcare are no strange bedfellows, the ease with which we do so depends on the former legacy of rendering race and infection equivalent. But that’s a minor quibble. Far more troublesome is how powerful the poetic parallel can be in mobilizing a depleted and ravaged body to generate enthusiastic if not cathartic response. In other words, far more dangerous is the promise of a cure. Let me be extremely clear before being suspected of Coronavirus denialism or of being an anti-vaxxer. It’s the other side of the parallel I’m thinking about here—the par","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46101413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1929044
A. B. Adwetewa-Badu
Eve L. Ewing, a professor of sociology at University of Chicago, is an academic, a comic book writer, and a poet. Her first collection of poetry, Electric Arches, was a whimsical and dynamic foray into Black life: aliens abound, descending upon neighborhoods filled with Black youth asking questions of their origins; basketball players reimagined as poetic narrators; there is a manifesto for shea butter; and Erykah Badu appears in an epigraph. Yet, with 1919, Ewing shows an increased depth with her poetry. Divided into three sections titled “Before,” “What Happened,” and “After,” Ewing presents Black life in Chicago before, during, and after the 1919 race riots. Taking as her starting point a report from 1922 written by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relation and a Race Riot, Ewing presents a case study of Black life as it was experienced and as it was documented. Ewing’s academic work is repurposed in this wellresearched poetry collection. The intertextuality of each poem opens a space for deep engagement with the archive and its absences, ultimately enabling Ewing to develop her own critical fabulations of the time period. “Sightseers,” from the second section, begins with an epigraph from the 1922 report. In the first stanza, the speaker states
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1929042
P. J. Edwards
{"title":"Book Review: Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women; Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance; Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora","authors":"P. J. Edwards","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1929042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1929042","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41344783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1932372
L. Chude-Sokei
{"title":"A Conversation with Cover Artist Abu Qadim Haqq","authors":"L. Chude-Sokei","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1932372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1932372","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48365691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1929043
Channon S. Miller
In A Black Women’s History of the United States, Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross provide readers a telling of the nation’s history by way of the writings, testimonies, and cultural expressions of Black women——as well as the often buried and fragmented traces of their voices in the archives. This retelling is, as described by the authors, a “richly textured portrait” (xi). It sits within a gallery comprised of works like Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Sharon Harley’s The Afro-American Woman, Paula Giddings’ When and Where I Enter, Darlene Clark-Hine’s Hine Sight, and Deborah Gray White’s Too Heavy a Load —a formative body of literature that chronicles Black women’s history through time and across place. The present work’s engravings not only reintroduce and integrate the herstories gathered by the existing literature, but its brushstrokes also broaden and thicken the historiography. This book was released shortly after the conclusion of 2019. Months before, in August, Black communities and public institutions commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of the disembarkment of Jamestown, Virginia’s first human cargo—“20. and odd Negroes” from West Central Africa. 1619 has become widely regarded as the year the United States and its dependency on Black slavery was established. The year and the African peoples forced to tend to the soil of the nascent country also bore African America. Yet, distinctly, Berry and Gross locate the inception of Black women’s lineages in America a century earlier. These foregrounding women were the daughters of “African male explorers and indigenous, Spanish, or Mexican women,” traversing present-day Southwest America in the mid to late 1500s (12). Moreover, they were free. “The first Black women who stepped foot onto what we consider American soil,” Chapter 1 asserts, “were not enslaved” (10). Although most go unnamed, documents such as the travel journals and ship registers of Spanish and Portuguese explorers, allude to the presence of Black women within their expedition parties. As these crews traversed and invaded indigenous occupied land in search of riches, trade routes, and territory, Black women acted as “interpreters, explorers, and servants” (11, 15). Coupled with long periods without water, physical exhaustion, volatile cultural clashes, and death—they often endured sexual assault at the hands of the men they traveled with.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1929036
Amy O. Yeboah
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1932379
M. Krishnan, Christopher E. W. Ouma, Laura Chrisman, M. Ngugi
Mukoma Wa Ngugi was born in 1971 in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up in Kenya. He may be the son of worldrenowned and iconic African writer Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, but in his own right has made a huge impact as both writer and scholar. For example, in 2013,New Africanmagazine named him one of the 100 most Influential Africans. He is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and the author of the novels Mrs. Shaw, Black Star Nairobi, Nairobi Heat, and two books of poetry, Logotherapy and Hurling Words at Consciousness. His most recent work of fiction, Unbury Our Dead with Song, is forthcoming from Cassava Republic Press. The Rise of the African Novel is his first extended work of literary scholarship and criticism, but it comes from a long-standing participation in the literary life of the continent and its diaspora. For example, he is a member of the African Literature Association’s Executive Council, and the cofounder of the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. A former co-editor of the open access, pan-African site Pambazuka News he’s also been a political columnist for the BBC’s Focus on Africa Magazine. His literary and public work has also appeared in numerous international venues including, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, Ebony.com, Chimurenga, Los Angeles Times, The LA Review of Books, The South African Labour Bulletin, Wasafiri, Africa is a Country among many others. He has been a guest on Democracy Now, NPR, Al Jazeera, and the BBC World Service amongst others. We thank him for his patience as we organized this roundtable and thank our esteemed guests for responding to his important work.
穆科马·瓦·恩古吉1971年出生于伊利诺伊州埃文斯顿,在肯尼亚长大。虽然他的父亲是世界著名的非洲作家Ngũgı / wa Thiong 'o,但作为作家和学者,他本身就有着巨大的影响力。例如,2013年,《新非洲》杂志将他评为100位最具影响力的非洲人之一。他是康奈尔大学英语副教授,著有小说《肖夫人》、《内罗毕黑星》、《内罗毕热》和两本诗集《意义疗法》和《对意识的谩骂》。他最近的小说作品《用歌声埋葬我们的死者》即将由木薯共和国出版社出版。《非洲小说的兴起》是他第一部关于文学研究和批评的延伸作品,但它来自于他长期参与非洲大陆及其流散的文学生活。例如,他是非洲文学协会执行委员会的成员,也是马巴提-康奈尔斯瓦希里非洲文学奖的联合创始人。他是开放获取的泛非洲网站Pambazuka News的前联合编辑,也是BBC《聚焦非洲》杂志的政治专栏作家。他的文学和公共作品也出现在许多国际场所,包括卫报,国际先驱论坛报,Ebony.com, Chimurenga,洛杉矶时报,洛杉矶书评,南非劳工公报,Wasafiri,非洲是一个国家等等。他曾是《现在民主》、美国国家公共电台(NPR)、半岛电视台(Al Jazeera)和BBC世界服务(BBC World Service)等节目的嘉宾。我们感谢他在我们组织这次圆桌会议期间的耐心,感谢我们尊敬的客人对他重要工作的回应。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1932383
J. Sexton
the main effects? The issue is explored in the homeopathic literature and hypersensitivity in patients discussed. An outline of a method for antidoting the bad effects of overdosing is presented with two case examples.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1889887
L. Paravisini-Gebert
I n the Caribbean region, an archipelago that Edouard Glissant once described as “fissured by histories,” resilience has been wrought out of the ebb and flow of intellectual and physical currents that have moved peoples and ideas across the sea, its islands, and continental shores. Given its colonial foundations and postcolonial vicissitudes, Caribbean reality has always been protean, hybrid, mercurial—a fluid ecology in endless dynamic transformation—yet one rooted in a geographic environment and in socioeconomic configurations determined by shared historical markers: a fateful European encounter, the Middle Passage and the triangular Atlantic trade, slavery, the plantation, a troublesome economic dependence on tourism, the slow violence of environmental mismanagement, never-ending cycles of diasporan departures and returns. For the nations sharing the archipelago, where no place or person is ever very distant from the sea, resilience—“the magnitude of shock the system can absorb and remain within a given state ... and the degree to which the system can build capacity for learning and adaptation”—has been elusive and contested, particularly now as the region faces the threats that come from rapidly changing environmental conditions that are the result of climate change. For the region, the threat of climate change —the product of global conditions it has had little role in producing—manifests itself in three very specific and immediate forms: rising sea levels, looming biodiversity losses, and an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. These threats challenge our understanding of the meaning of resilience, raising questions about “the magnitude of shock” our ecologies and populations can absorb and survive, and the degree to which they can continue to adapt and thrive in rapidly changing circumstances. These circumstances deeply exacerbate the archipelago’s already serious challenges, the product of centuries of exploitative extractivist colonial practices that assessed the region’s natural and human resources solely in terms of their value as commodities for production and exportation. RobNixon, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), has offered us a guide to understanding how the slow violence perpetrated on Caribbean islands as “resource extraction nations”—a violence he defines as one that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”— has compromised the region’s environmental health and, by definition, its capacity for rebounding. In the discourse of Caribbean resilience, Haiti has emerged as a symbol of a nation in environmental crisis, an ecological revenant warning of the direst consequences facing Caribbean nations not engaging in a concerted effort to reverse ecological degradation and biodiversity collapse. The concern is not misplaced, as in spaces as
{"title":"Caribbean Archipelagos and Mainlands","authors":"L. Paravisini-Gebert","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2021.1889887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2021.1889887","url":null,"abstract":"I n the Caribbean region, an archipelago that Edouard Glissant once described as “fissured by histories,” resilience has been wrought out of the ebb and flow of intellectual and physical currents that have moved peoples and ideas across the sea, its islands, and continental shores. Given its colonial foundations and postcolonial vicissitudes, Caribbean reality has always been protean, hybrid, mercurial—a fluid ecology in endless dynamic transformation—yet one rooted in a geographic environment and in socioeconomic configurations determined by shared historical markers: a fateful European encounter, the Middle Passage and the triangular Atlantic trade, slavery, the plantation, a troublesome economic dependence on tourism, the slow violence of environmental mismanagement, never-ending cycles of diasporan departures and returns. For the nations sharing the archipelago, where no place or person is ever very distant from the sea, resilience—“the magnitude of shock the system can absorb and remain within a given state ... and the degree to which the system can build capacity for learning and adaptation”—has been elusive and contested, particularly now as the region faces the threats that come from rapidly changing environmental conditions that are the result of climate change. For the region, the threat of climate change —the product of global conditions it has had little role in producing—manifests itself in three very specific and immediate forms: rising sea levels, looming biodiversity losses, and an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. These threats challenge our understanding of the meaning of resilience, raising questions about “the magnitude of shock” our ecologies and populations can absorb and survive, and the degree to which they can continue to adapt and thrive in rapidly changing circumstances. These circumstances deeply exacerbate the archipelago’s already serious challenges, the product of centuries of exploitative extractivist colonial practices that assessed the region’s natural and human resources solely in terms of their value as commodities for production and exportation. RobNixon, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), has offered us a guide to understanding how the slow violence perpetrated on Caribbean islands as “resource extraction nations”—a violence he defines as one that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”— has compromised the region’s environmental health and, by definition, its capacity for rebounding. In the discourse of Caribbean resilience, Haiti has emerged as a symbol of a nation in environmental crisis, an ecological revenant warning of the direst consequences facing Caribbean nations not engaging in a concerted effort to reverse ecological degradation and biodiversity collapse. The concern is not misplaced, as in spaces as","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00064246.2021.1889887","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42541502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2021.1888640
P. Taylor
An abolitionist pamphlet published in Britain in 1816 in the wake of Barbados’ Easter Rebellion attacked the follies of the Barbadian plantocracy, referring to “a ridiculous account which appeared in the newspapers, that a Haytian fleet had been seen steering towards Barbadoes at the time the insurrection broke out.” While the Barbadian plantocracy feared the idea of humanity that a newly independent Haiti represented, both planters and abolitionists discounted rebel agency by blaming each other for the rebellion. In contrast, Barbadian rebels, writes Hilary Beckles, saw themselves as the “final catalyst” inaugurating the new social order and embraced the freedom that ushered in the new nation of Haiti in 1804. Apprehended and interrogated following the rebellion, Cuffee Ned stated that Mingo was the name by which he knew the island of “Saint Domingo” (Saint-Domingue), the one island in the West Indies where enslaved Africans were free because, in his words, “they had fought for it and got it.” There are few references to the cultural and religious activities of the rebels in the Barbados House of Assembly’s Report on the rebellion from which Cuffee Ned’s statement is taken. However, two decades after the rebellion pseudonymous English author Theodore Easel wrote a short story about the rebellion depicting a rebel leader named Mingo as an Obeahman. In “The ObiahMan, or a Tale of St. Phillip’s,” one of various scattered portraits in the book Desultory Sketches and Tales of Barbados, Easel places Mingo at the center of the rebellion, portraying him as a cunning, yet deluded spiritual leader. Interestingly, Mingo was also the name of one of the leaders of the rebellion, as identified in the so-called confession of Robert, of Simmons Plantation, in the Assembly’s Report. Although Easel does not mention Haiti or Saint-Domingue directly, by identifying Obeah with the demonic he locates the term in a discursive relationship with Vodou (or so called “voodoo”), that supposed force of evil invented by the colonial imaginary and constantly identified by the West with the “black peril” that was Haiti. As Edward Brathwaite has argued, however, the Obeahman was “doctor, philosopher, and priest.” Tracing the etymology and usage of the term “Obeah” back to African linguistic sources, Handler and Bilby demonstrate that the term is best understood in the context of slave society in a positive rather than a negative sense:
1816年巴巴多斯复活节起义后,英国出版了一本废奴主义小册子,抨击巴巴多斯植物统治的愚蠢行为,提到“报纸上出现的一个荒谬的说法,即起义爆发时,有人看到一支海伊舰队驶向巴巴多斯。“虽然巴巴多斯的种植园主政权害怕新独立的海地所代表的人性观念,但种植园主和废奴主义者都对叛乱机构不屑一顾,相互指责对方应为叛乱负责。相比之下,希拉里·贝克尔斯(Hilary Beckles)写道,巴巴多斯叛军将自己视为开启新社会秩序的“最后催化剂”,并拥抱1804年海地新国家的自由。Cuffee Ned在叛乱后受到逮捕和审问,他说明戈是他所知道的“圣多明各”岛的名字,这是西印度群岛被奴役的非洲人获得自由的一个岛屿,用他的话说,“他们为之而战,并得到了它。”在巴巴多斯议会关于叛乱的报告中,几乎没有提到反叛分子的文化和宗教活动,库菲·内德的声明就是从这份报告中摘录的。然而,在叛乱20年后,化名的英国作家西奥多·伊塞尔写了一篇关于叛乱的短篇小说,将一位名叫明戈的叛军领袖描绘成一名奥拜曼人。在《巴巴多斯的脱硫素描和故事》一书中各种零散的肖像之一《奥比亚人》(The ObiahMan,or a Tale of St.Phillip’s)中,伊塞尔将明戈置于叛乱的中心,将他描绘成一个狡猾但被欺骗的精神领袖。有趣的是,明戈也是叛乱领导人之一的名字,正如议会报告中西蒙斯种植园的罗伯特所谓的供词所述。尽管Easel没有直接提到海地或圣多明各,但通过将Obeah与魔鬼联系起来,他将这个词定位为与Vodou(或所谓的“voodoo”)的话语关系,Vodou是殖民想象中发明的所谓邪恶力量,西方不断将其与海地的“黑危险”联系起来。然而,正如Edward Brathwaite所说,Obeahman是“医生、哲学家和牧师”。Handler和Bilby将“Obeah”一词的词源和用法追溯到非洲语言来源,证明了这个词最好在奴隶社会的背景下从积极而非消极的意义来理解:
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