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Foreign Before "The Foreigner": Caribbean Fetishes, Zombi, and Jewett's Conjure Aesthetics
- Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 74, Number 4, Winter 2018
- pp. 115-144
- 10.1353/arq.2018.0024
- Article
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Abstract:
This essay claims that the analeptic inclusion of Sarah Orne Jewett's short story "The Foreigner" (1899) into her novel TheCountry of the Pointed Firs (1896)places a conjure woman from Martinique and her healing practices at the heart of Country's white village in Maine. By thus endowing the village's healer with conjure powers, "The Foreigner" dramatically re-contextualizes the communal world of Jewett's Country, and comes to testify to the complex trans-American routes by which colonial epistemologies, derived from Afro-Caribbean healing practices of Obeah and Quimbois traditions, fashion political, economic, medical and aesthetic transactions between Europe, Africa and the Americas.