Darius Gray Black History Month Lecture
"Inventing Tituba: Enslaved Women, 'Witchcraft,' and Racial Gender-Making in the Early Atlantic"
An enslaved woman of indigenous Caribbean or South American descent racialized as African in later decades, Tituba is the figure through whom race often enters the historiography of witchcraft in the United States. Yet Tituba is only the most famous of a constellation of non-European descended women around the Salem Witch Trials whose ethnicities and cultural traditions became mired in Euro-American concepts of witchcraft during and in the wake of the trials.
In the years following the Salem tragedy, Anglophone colonial governments in the Caribbean and North America relegated witchcraft to the realm of fanciful “superstition.” Nevertheless, the concept persisted as a category through which the religious practices of, particularly female, cultural and racial “primitives” became legible. By illuminating the prominence of “witchcraft” in discourses about African and African American women’s religiosity prior to, during, and after Salem, this talk explores how the category contributed to racialized gender narratives of religion and retained its salience beyond the geographical and chronological confines of Tituba.
Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh
Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh is associate professor of religious studies and an affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. Her teaching and research explores the intersections of race, religion, and gender in the United States.
As a historian of African American religion, Wells-Oghoghomeh specializes in the religiosity of enslaved people in the South, religion in the African Atlantic, and women's religious histories. Her first book The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South offers a gendered history of enslaved people's religiosity from the colonial period to the onset of the Civil War. She is currently at work on her second project, which traces the gendered, racialized history of phenomena termed "witchcraft" in the United States.
Wells-Oghoghomeh's work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Forum for Theological Education, among others. She received a BA in English from Spelman College, and Master of Divinity and PhD from Emory University.
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