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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

Ray Leonard
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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.

Keywords

Caribbeanslaverycolonialismambivalenceeighteenth centuryHaitiSaint-Domingue
Type
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 

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References

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2 He writes that “between the first slave shipments of the early 1500s and the 1791 insurrection of northern Saint-Domingue, most Western observers treated manifestations of slave resistance and defiance with the ambivalent characteristic of their overall treatment of colonization and slavery. On the one hand, resistance and defiance did not exist because to acknowledge them was to acknowledge the humanity of the enslaved. On the other hand, because resistance occurred, it was dealt with quite severely, within or around the plantations.” Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1995) 83 Google Scholar.

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10 Ibid.

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16 Diana Paton also goes on to show that white Christian narratives depicting spiritual practices on the West Coast of Africa rarely mention witchcraft directly. She writes that the “absence of discussion of the witch in these sources does not mean that the concept of witchcraft did not exist in these societies, but it does suggest that witchcraft caused less concern there than in early modern Europe.” I’d like to contend, rather, that these missionaries, like Labat, were aware that the forms of West African spirituality they witnessed operated in a register beyond familiar Christian thought. Paton, Diana, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic—Slavery,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69.2 (April 2012): 243 Google Scholar.

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21 Debien also notices that the “secrecy” of these rituals was largely a fiction—at least in the cases presented here. He advances that “perhaps the assemblies were called secret in the sense of ‘mysterious,’ or ‘incomprehensible.’ ” Here he seems to be looking forward to Trouillot, who popularized the notion of black agency as “inconceivable.” As I have argued, however, this theorization cannot account for the historical significance of the ritual observance. Debien, “Assembles Nocturne d’Esclaves,” 283.

22 Ibid., 280.

23 Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic—Slavery,” 237.

24 Debien, “Assembles Nocturne d’Esclaves,” 281.

25 Ibid., 273.

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