Obeah and Hosay: Two Religions of the Caribbean Region

FAIN: FA-251848-17

Aisha Khan
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)

A book-length comparative study of two of the Caribbean's most understudied religions--Obeah and Hosay.

My project is a study of the intersections of religious and racial identities through comparative analysis of Obeah and Hosay, two of the Caribbean region’s defining yet understudied religions. My approach is an ethnographic one that draws on the phenomenological tradition. Although Obeah and Hosay are diverse in their beliefs and in their practitioners, they are often treated more categorically, based on their respective African and Indian origins. My project probes assumptions about the inevitable tensions of religious and racial difference in the Caribbean by exploring lived experience filtered through western Enlightenment conceptualizations of religion and race across Caribbean-Atlantic space and colonial and postcolonial time. Inquiring into the relationship between interpretive categories of religion and race, their modes of practice, and the power relations that form their contexts allows better understanding of identities, conflict and governance, and heritage in the Americas.

Associated Products

“Race and its Religious Identities: Islamic Provenance and Caribbean Hosay,” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Race and its Religious Identities: Islamic Provenance and Caribbean Hosay,”
Author: Aisha Khan
Abstract: Although no Caribbean country has a Muslim majority population, Islam has been an important presence for at least five centuries. The major conduits of Islam in the region were labor schemes: African slavery and Indian indenture. At the same time, Islam’s Caribbean journeys included explorers and emigrants who hailed from diverse societies and cultures around the globe, and who have been devotees of varying schools of Islamic thought. Scholarship on Caribbean Islam and Muslims typically has emphasized either Africans or Indians, although also acknowledging the heterogeneous practitioners and practices that define them. These complexities have important implications for the ways that racial and religious identities are characterized with regard to Caribbean Muslims. Based on my forthcoming book, my presentation considers the ways that “African” and “Indian” racial identities in the Caribbean are constituted through their historical intersection with ideas about religion and religious identities. I argue that this nexus—the racialization of religion and religionization of race—is key to understanding the hierarchies of human “types” that inform the perception and the practice of Islam in the colonial and post-independence eras. My discussion will draw from the Caribbean cultural phenomenon known as “Hosay,” the region’s local version of the Islamic mourning ritual, Muharram.
Date: 04/15/19
Conference Name: Islam in America speaker series, Department of Religious Studies, Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and Mediterranean Studies Forum, Stanford University

The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Book)
Title: The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World
Author: Aisha Khan
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987821
Primary URL Description: Publisher website
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780674987821

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