Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad

J. Brent Crosson’s Experiments with Power is, indeed, an experiment, and a successful one at that. A powerfully written, meticulously researched ethnography, Crosson offers an insightful way forward for thinking critically about the policing of Africanderived religions in the afterlife of slavery and colonialism in Trinidad and throughout the Americas. This policing is not a relic of the past, but as the spiritual workers in Crosson’s narrative argue, the past and the present are not only interconnected, but they blur. Pointedly, Crosson charts how the historical construction of the “thug” by the state and its allies has worked in tandem with the construction of the category of “the demonic,” such that criminalized Black people are also likened to “demons.” As I read Crosson’s theoretical analysis, especially in the first chapter “What Obeah Does Do,” I was reminded of former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony in 2014 that the slain Michael Brown, Jr.—whom he killed—was “like a demon.” In his narrative account, Crosson joins a rich discourse on the policing of Black people and Black people’s religions. Without question, policing is shaped by carcerality, and as Crosson shows, by carceral theologies at the helm of the category of “religion.” Antiblackness shapes the world as we know it, including policing, and “religion” is often shaped by antiblackness, and so as Crosson encourages, we must examine “what it excludes rather than [just] its recognized representations” (9). Religion and religious studies are confining discourses, and Black people are often their prisoners, seeking the freedom to believe, practice, and live religious lives not shaped by statecraft. Obeah, a criminalized, policed constellation of African-derived religious practices, has only recently been decriminalized in Trinidad as of 2000, though the stigma surrounding it persists throughout the