This talk examines the trope of the “white witch” in the eighteenth-century West Indies as it circulated across travel narratives, colonial reports, works of fiction, natural history, and medical treatises.

White creole women were often represented through ambivalent and even hostile stereotypes that cast them as indolent and cruel tropical ladies, hypersexual degenerates, or unstable reproducers of whiteness. Their bodies were perceived as vulnerable to “creolization,” while their complexions were read as fragile markers of privilege. Accusations of witchcraft, particularly when linked to women’s engagement with African and Indigenous practices, exposed deep anxieties about female agency and the permeability of racial boundaries.

Focusing on the use of cashew nuts in whitening practices, this talk reframes women’s interethnic exchanges in the region and repositions the figure of the “white witch” as a lens through which to explore the intersections of gender, race, and science.

Speaker

Manuela Coppola earned her PhD in Postcolonial Studies from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (Italy). Since 2023, she has been affiliated with the Emerson College, where she teaches Global Literatures. She is the author of L’isola madre: Maternità e memoria nella narrativa di Jean Rhys e Jamaica Kincaid (Tangram, 2010), and Crossovers: Language and orality in anglophone Caribbean poetry (Morlacchi, 2011). Her research and publications span Translation Studies, Postcolonial and Gender Studies, and Global Literatures. She is currently working on the interethnic circulation and transmission of botanical knowledge in the eighteenth-century West Indies.

Moderator

Marieke Bloembergen is a cultural historian and senior researcher at KITLV, and professor in Heritage and Postcolonial Studies in Indonesian History at Leiden University’s Institute for History. Her research interests concern the political dynamics of cultural knowledge production in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, in relation to objects, non-human species, heritage practices, art, and notions of (environmental) care, and in their local, inter-Asian and global dimensions. 

Image

'Free women of color with their children and servants in a landscape', by Agostino Brunias, c. 1764 (public domain image).

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