Conjuring Moments in African American Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Kameelah L. Martin

   Pages 1-14

3. “Thou Shall Not Suffer a Witch to Live”

   • Kameelah L. Martin

   Pages 15-53

4. From Farce to Folk Hero, or a Twentieth-Century Revival of the Conjure Woman

   • Kameelah L. Martin

   Pages 55-88

5. Troubling the Water

   • Kameelah L. Martin

   Pages 89-126

6. Of Blues Narratives and Conjure Magic

   • Kameelah L. Martin

   Pages 127-158

7. Coda

   • Kameelah L. Martin

   Pages 159-163

8. Back Matter

   Pages 165-189

   PDF

This book engages the ways African American authors have shifted, recycled, and reinvented the conjure woman in fiction. Kameelah Martin Samuel traces her presence and function in twentieth-century literature through historical records, oral histories, blues music, and collections of African American folklore.

• America
• Amerikanische Literatur
• fiction

“Martin’s work remedies a gap in academic scholarship that has overlooked the critical role that the conjurer woman has played in literature, and this work seems to elevate her to the status of cultural icon.” (A Year's Work in English Studies, 2015)

Kameelah L. Martin is a Vistiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Houston.

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