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  • Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo by Kameelah L. Martin
  • Isiah Lavender III (bio)
Martin, Kameelah L. Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Kameelah L. Martin rightly calls attention to the dearth of scholarship on the conjure woman as a literary archetype in black literature—unlike the consideration received by the tragic mulatta or the mammy figure—with her well-written critical study Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo (2013). Although much critical work focuses on the occult in American culture in general, from film, television, music, visual arts, and even literature, no specific study of the literary conjure woman exists. In their influential Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition (1985), Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers contextualize how black women writers function as conjurers through act of writing but make no remarks on the conjure woman as a literary type. Valerie Lee’s Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings (1996) focuses on the midwife in the novels of Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, but not conjure women. John W. Roberts’s From Trickster to Batman: The Black Folk Hero from Slavery to Freedom (1989) considers the black male conjurer as a folk hero but makes no mention of the female counterpart.

More recently, James W. Coleman explores notions of faith in his Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth Century African American Fiction (2006) without a nuanced and careful treatment of the conjure woman per se. Without touching on the conjurer in visual culture or literary studies, Sharla M. Fett provides an important historical work on conjuring as a tradition with Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2002). Finally, Elizabeth J. West’s African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threading Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, & Being (2011) comes closest to mirroring Martin’s study by attending to the pervasiveness of African epistemologies in the fiction of African American women up through the Harlem Renaissance without concentrating on the figure of the conjure woman. Martin convincingly identifies a knowledge gap in which she situates her own text to fill regarding the conjuring tradition with her analysis of works by Maryse Condé, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor, among many others.

In the four chapters of Conjuring Moments, Martin traces the development of the conjure woman archetype in the black literary imagination across history, material culture, folklore, and blues music while engaging issues of female agency and challenging a variety of stereotypes. She examines and questions the spiritual tensions and moral quandaries necessitated by Western notions of conjure work portrayed by a variety of black writers by advancing four key arguments. First, African American writers have successfully undermined negative associations of women and conjuring through literary formulations. Second, the conjure woman, as a historical and mythological figure, resists oppression and imparts a social criticism in ways that other black female literary paradigms do not. Third, a symbiotic connection exists between conjure women and the blues particular to African American fiction. And fourth, the conjure woman should be reassessed as a cultural icon because of her prominent place in mainstream American culture as evinced by history, film, music, and literature.

In expanding these claims, Martin uses three terms consistently throughout her book in her examination of the literary conjure woman within the historical context of black spirit [End Page 1183] work as reflected in fictional texts—conjure moments, the notion of the nonbeliever, and the professional rivalry. She effectively challenges the infamy associated with the occult in general. By spirit work, Martin means “ritual practices of African derived religious practices involved in the New World: obeah, Vodou, Lucumí, espiritismo, conjure and hoodoo, Candomblé, voodoo, and others” as well as “communication with supernatural entities” (1). She defines conjuring moments as “identifiable points in the text where conjuring or African-derived ceremonial practices occur and advance the narrative action” such as root work or incantations (5). Martin next explains that the nonbeliever fails to recognize or acknowledge “the spiritual power and supernatural possibilities...

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