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Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. By Yvonne P. Chireau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. ix + 226 pp. $34.95 cloth.
Historians of African American religion have not given sustained attention to the topic of magic. When they do make passing reference to the use of magic by figures such as Gullah Jack, Marie Laveau, or rural root workers, these instances are too often treated as vestigial African folklore on the road to evangelical Protestant consolidation.
Yvonne Chireau's Black Magic is thus an important reminder for the field to reconsider the parameters of African American religious history with regard to religion and magic. Chireau critiques the tendency of interpreters to counterpose "non-Christian" (that is, "African") elements with "Christian" aspects of black religious life, because all too commonly, this analytic posture obscures "the range of relationships which might exist between them" (4). Chireau observes both tension and convergence between Conjure and religion, a "fluid and constantly shifting" relationship (25). But she argues that more often, these practices have been experienced as a "single complex" (4) or as "complementary categories" (7) within the "lived religion" of black North Americans. The topic of Black Magic has some affinities, then, with recent literature on religious creolization in African diaspora religions, several examples of which Chireau briefly mentions. In resisting the tendency to polarize African American religion with magic, Conjure, or "supernaturalism" (her definitional distinctions between these terms...