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Obeah has been called superstition, “black magic,” and even a crime but those labels have a history, and that history was built to serve colonial power. We sit down with historian Dr. Katharine Gerbner to trace how African-derived spiritual and healing traditions in Jamaica were deliberately stigmatized through slavery, missionary politics, and law.

We follow the chain from a rare 1755 archival reference to the shockwaves of 1760, when Tacky's Rebellion prompts British colonial authorities to outlaw Obeah as a threat to control. Along the way, we unpack why defining Obeah is so difficult when most surviving sources come from enslavers and missionaries, and how Gerbner’s microhistory method reads the archive for what it tries to hide. One of the most surprising turns is the Moravian missionary Zacharias George Caries being called an “Obeahman,” opening up a “space of correlation” where Afro-Jamaicans do not separate Christianity from Obeah in the rigid way many of us inherit today.

We also connect this history to the present: Obeah remains illegal in Jamaica, and the long arc of criminalization still shapes public stigma, community silence, and debates about decriminalization. If you care about Caribbean history, Jamaican culture, African diaspora religion, and the politics of the archive, this conversation offers a new way to see what we have been taught to fear and who benefits from that fear.

Katharine Gerbner is a historian of religion, race, and freedom. She examines religious practices that have been excluded from traditional definitions of religion and develops multilingual archival strategies to uncover stories that have been marginalized and forgotten. She is the author of Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025) and Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). She is Associate Professor of History and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota.

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The strangest thing about the truth is how often it arrives late. A story your elders carried for years gets dismissed as “just talk” until an archive opens, a report drops, a government admits wrongdoing, or scholars finally confirm what communities already knew. When that happens, the past doesn’t simply become clearer. It becomes heavier, more complicated, and harder to tuck away. In today's episode, I offer a reflection on Caribbean history, memory, and what it means to relearn entire narratives, not just “humanize” individual historical figures. I think through why truth is less a single revelation and more a long process, shaped by silence, denial, and distortion.

Then comes the question that won’t let go: what does reconciliation actually require? Forgiveness, acknowledgement, accountability, compensation, structural change? And who gets to decide when it’s “done”? If you care about Caribbean history and culture, political violence, colonial legacies, activism, and public memory, this reflection is for you. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review, then tell me how you choose to carry your history forward.

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Today, we reshare our reasoning with Dr. Paul López Oro to trace the Garifuna story across Caribbean history, from St Vincent and the Carib Wars to forced exile in 1797 and the building of communities along the Central America Caribbean coast in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and beyond. Along the way, we wrestle with what it means to be Black and Indigenous at the same time, especially in societies that insist those identities must be separate.

We dig into the “void in the archive” and why collective memory and oral tradition become more than storytelling. For Garifuna communities, memory shapes political life right now: claims to ancestral territories, fights for land rights, and daily resistance to anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in nationalist narratives that erase contributions made long before the modern republics were born. From there, we explore Garifuna Settlement Day as an embodied archive and a public demand for visibility, first in Belize and later in New York City. We connect diaspora routes to labor history in the United States, including pathways through New Orleans and the long work of building community “in the company of” other Black populations.

Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is an Assistant Professor and Director of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College. He is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose teaching and research interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black Queer Feminisms. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism. He is working on his first book manuscript, Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York, is a transdisciplinary ethnographic study analyzing oral histories, performances, social media, film, literary texts and visual cultures to unearth the political, intellectual, cultural and spiritual genealogies of Garifuna women and subaltern geographies of Garifuna LGBTQ+ folks at the forefront of Garifuna transnational movements in New York City.

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Headlines turn migration into a single story about borders and crisis. We open the lens, traveling through the Caribbean and Latin America to reveal routes, identities, and cultural worlds that rarely make it into the frame. Joined by co-editors Dr. Patsy Lewis and Dr. Kristen Kolenz, we share how our new book, Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America, brings together scholars and artists to map movement beyond the U.S.-centric view.

We dive into case studies that challenge assumptions: Venezuelans navigating layered sovereignties in Curaçao and Trinidad, Haitian communities negotiating visibility and exclusion, and Chinese migration in Central America shaped by shifting ties between Taiwan and China. We unpack racial triangulation and diaspora politics from Miami to New York, examining how belonging shifts across languages, borders, and Blackness. Along the way, we discuss a people-centered approach that recognizes migrants as creators of social worlds, economies, and culture. Through interdisciplinary methods, we build a toolkit for studying migration that is rigorous, humane, and usable for students, organizers, and policymakers.

Patsy Lewis is Research Professor, Department of Africana Studies, Brown University. She specializes in the political economy and development challenges of the Caribbean. Her publications include Caribbean Regional Integration: A Critical Development Approach; Caribbean Integration: Uncertainty in a Time of Global Fragmentation, Co-edited with Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts and Jessica Byron; and Surviving Small Size: Regional Integration in Caribbean Ministates.

Kristen Kolenz is an assistant professor in the international studies program and co-chair of the gender studies program at Centre College in Kentucky. Before joining the Centre faculty in 2022, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University and earned her PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University. She also recently published “Mesomapping the Borderlands: Seeing Life, Making Home, and Thinking Iteratively” in Aztlán.

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What happens when you go searching for the words of Caribbean women—and find silence where there should be an echo? We follow that uneasy question into the kitchens, verandas, classrooms, and studios where wisdom has always lived, then ask why so little of it appears on slides, posters, and timelines. Along the way, we unpack how publishing power, archival choices, and diaspora networks shape which voices become quotable and which remain unnamed, even as their ideas guide our lives.

We explore proverbs like every mickle mek a muckle and one one coco full basket as distilled philosophies of patience, accumulation, and community care. These are not folk extras; they are intellectual traditions forged through scarcity, migration, and resistance. We contrast the global prominence of figures like Marcus Garvey or Audre Lorde with the many Caribbean women whose insights travel orally or locally and rarely get tagged to a name. Then we turn to a practical solution: building a living archive by treating our conversations with scholars, artists, and educators as citable sources. When a phrase reframes history, names a power dynamic, or offers a tool for survival, we capture it, attribute it, and pass it on.

Together we commit to a simple practice with big stakes: cite women’s words. Citation is care, visibility, and lineage—a way to ensure that students, educators, and community organizers can trace ideas back to the women who shaped them. We close with an open invitation: share the quote by a Caribbean woman you live by, whether it came from a poet, a professor, a musician, a grandmother, or a guest on the show. Tag us and tell us what it means to you, and we’ll amplify it so those voices stay present in our feeds, our classrooms, and our futures.

If this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves Caribbean history and culture, and leave a review so more listeners can find these voices. Your citation, your share, and your story help build the archive.

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A woman signs up 3,000 new members, walks into a meeting she was invited to lead, and is assassinated at the podium. That single moment opens a window into the hidden architecture of a global movement and the women who kept it alive when headlines and historians looked away. We continue our conversation with Dr. Natanya Duncan to explore the life and legacy of Princess Laura Adorkor Kofey and the broader force she represents: efficient womanhood inside the Universal Negro Improvement Association. We unpack how Kofey leveraged overlapping memberships across Black political organizations to grow the UNIA at scale, and why her ability to mobilize made her both indispensable and threatening. Dr. Duncan traces archival breadcrumbs to show how debates about Kofey’s origins obscured the central question: who shot her, and what does that reveal about power, loyalty, and gender in mass movements?

We broaden the lens to spotlight women like Henrietta Vinton Davis who signed stock certificates and underwrote the Black Star Line, illustrating how everyday decisions about money, mutual aid, and accountability built real infrastructure. This isn’t just civil rights history; it’s a blueprint for Black autonomy and human rights that shaped the tactics of later movements and still resonates now. Tune in, rethink the narrative, and help surface the names and questions that deserve daylight.

City University of New York Associate Professor of History, Dr. Natanya Duncan's research and teaching focuses on global freedom movements of the 20th and 21st Century. Duncan’s research interest includes constructions of identity and nation building amongst women of color; migrations; color and class in Diasporic communities; and the engagements of intellectuals throughout the African Diaspora. Her book, An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, (University of North Carolina Press 2025) focuses on the distinct activist strategies in-acted by women in the UNIA, which Duncan calls an efficient womanhood. Following the ways women in the UNIA scripted their own understanding of Pan Africanism, Black Nationalism and constructions of Diasporic Blackness, the work traces the blending of nationalist and gendered concerns amongst known and lesser known Garveyite women.

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What happens when the archive starts talking back? We sat down with Dr. Natanya Duncan to illuminate the women who built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) from the ground up and gave the movement its global muscle. From a Kingston porch to Harlem kitchens and London cafés, their labor carried Garveyism across continents while reshaping what Black leadership looked like in the early twentieth century. Along the way, we meet names that deserve the spotlight: Henrietta Vinton Davis, Laura Kofey, and especially the Two Amys. Amy Ashwood Garvey co-founded the UNIA and helped the Negro World reach readers far beyond Harlem. Amy Jacques Garvey transformed the paper’s women’s page into a political and strategic forum, setting the tone for a movement that saw home life and nation building as the same fight.

Threaded through the conversation is “efficient womanhood,” a term recovered in the archive that captures how UNIA women blended gender demands with nationalist goals as one practical program. We explore how public stance and private negotiation worked in tandem, why women printed their addresses and left a paper trail of property, and how their coalitions nurtured anticolonial leadership. This is a story of logistics, courage, and care: parades organized, ledgers balanced, alliances brokered, and a movement sustained in the face of surveillance and erasure.

Editor's Note: At 03:14, Dr. Duncan meant to refer to Dr. Patrick E. Bryan instead of "Patrick Henry."

City University of New York Associate Professor of History, Dr. Natanya Duncan's research and teaching focuses on global freedom movements of the 20th and 21st Century. Duncan’s research interest includes constructions of identity and nation building amongst women of color; migrations; color and class in Diasporic communities; and the engagements of intellectuals throughout the African Diaspora. Her book, An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, (University of North Carolina Press 2025) focuses on the distinct activist strategies in-acted by women in the UNIA, which Duncan calls an efficient womanhood. Following the ways women in the UNIA scripted their own understanding of Pan Africanism, Black Nationalism and constructions of Diasporic Blackness, the work traces the blendi

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Think you know the Garvey story? Meet the two Amys who built its backbone. We dive into the lives of Amy Ashwood Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, Jamaican visionaries whose organizing, editing, and leadership turned a charismatic vision into a global movement. Their names appear in the margins of many textbooks, but their fingerprints are on every chapter of Garveyism’s rise, reach, and survival.

We trace Amy Ashwood’s role as a UNIA co-founder, strategist, and early architect who helped design the organization’s infrastructure in Jamaica and nurtured its international ambitions. Her work exemplifies a transatlantic Caribbean feminism rooted in institution-building and political education, long before the term became common. We then spotlight Amy Jacques, a journalist and editor whose stewardship during Garvey’s imprisonment kept the movement alive. She edited The Negro World, wrote speeches, managed correspondence, and articulated a bold vision for women’s leadership in Black liberation. By editing and publishing The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, she preserved a scattered archive and ensured that future generations could study, adapt, and debate Garveyism.

Along the way, we acknowledge the human complexity—yes, Marcus married two Amys—and use that irony to open the door to deeper truths: movements are made by people with egos, contradictions, humor, and heart. Re-centering these women shifts how we measure impact, highlighting the editors, organizers, archivists, and educators who keep ideas moving across borders and time. If you’ve only heard the headline, this conversation invites you into the story behind it. If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can discover the women who built Garveyism. What other hidden architects of history should we feature next?

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