JCB Reads: Katharine Gerbner's Archival Irruptions

Launched during the 2024-5 academic year, JCB Reads offers former JCB fellows the opportunity to share their recent book publications. These online events are open to anyone who is interested. The link to the Zoom meeting will be published a few days before the event takes place on the individual event page.

Join us on Thursday, April 2, 2026 at noon for a virtual discussion of Katharine Gerbner's Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025).

All are welcome!

About the book

In 1760, after the largest slave revolt in the 18th-century British Empire, colonial authorities criminalized the Afro-Caribbean practice of Obeah, branding it a “wicked Art.” Archival Irruptions uncovers the largely unknown history of Obeah before its criminalization. Using neglected multilingual archives, Gerbner reveals that Obeah was a prophetic practice of healing and resistance. She does so by offering a new method to recover repressed histories and challenge dominant narratives by reading for “irruptions”–narrative disruptions within colonial and missionary archives. This method not only redefines the story of Obeah but also offers a powerful tool for uncovering marginalized histories within imperial archives.