Date of Award
Summer 2025
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Department
History
First Advisor
Kathryn Edwards
Abstract
Conjure practices in the nineteenth-century American South, such as “Hoodoo” or “Voodoo,” are commonly portrayed as primarily “black” beliefs or entrenched in “Africanistic” cultures. For the enslaved, their black spiritual systems, including conjure, were a powerful tool of resistance against the white enslaver. Black conjure practitioners established themselves as an affordable and pervasive medical alternative to often ineffective or harmful professional medicines for black and white Southerners, regardless of class. In this way, conjure challenged the authority of racial capitalism and destabilized the perceived moral and intellectual superiority of whiteness. Moreover, by examining legal documents, newspapers, fictional literature, and oral accounts, this thesis argues that conjure, while rooted in Afro-Atlantic contexts, was not solely a black practice. Rather, conjure was the cultural and spiritual product of an interracial and interconnected Southern society, one that transcended the rigid lines of racial division and violence from the antebellum period to the dawn of Jim Crow. White, black, and indigenous people in the South accepted, used, and paid for the services of conjurers regardless of racial or class identity. Nonetheless, conjure medicine and belief, ultimately, remained portrayed as inferior and immoral when compared to systems deemed as “legitimate,” “scientific,” or, in effect, culturally “white.” Despite this dominant perception, conjure practice persisted and, through its medical and economic interconnectivity, went against the grain of racial capitalism.
Rights
© 2025, Dylan T Kobus
Recommended Citation
Kobus, D. T.(2025). Conjuring Realities: Southern Supernaturalism and Race from the Antebellum Era to the Early Twentieth Century. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8463