Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition

Yvonne P. Chireau is a scholar of African American religious history, and this University of California Press book is her academic history of hoodoo, or conjure, the African American folk magical tradition of the American South, tracing its formation from both African religious retentions and nineteenth century American Christianity. Its strength is treating conjure as a genuine historical religious formation in its own right, with its own documented sources and development, rather than as either superstition or a simple survival of unmodified African practice. Its limit is that it is a historical study centered on the tradition's formation and its Christian and African sources specifically, so a claim about contemporary hoodoo practice as it exists today, rather than its nineteenth century formation, may need a source addressing that more recent period directly.