Petrine Archer [.com]

“In view of all this, what theory can you offer me that will explain this moment when once common bedfellows find themselves estranged? What happens when we grope within the void and find that our bogies no longer coincide? Can you tell me earnestly that Derrida or even Hall can unravel the absurdity and complexity of this reality? Is there a way to deconstruct pain?  Because, I recognize that issues of culture and conflict are ones that I need to resolve personally and professionally before I can begin to articulate them philosophically…the question is do you?”1

Last semester, in a paper offered for the SOCHUM’s Graduate Workshop, I voiced a series of questions that had come out of my time here. They were as much a challenge to myself as they were to the audience, and combined with an on going prodding of my conscience (and others) in seminars, they marked a certain frustration that I had been experiencing in my work. For some time, I have been searching for a better fit between the problems of black reality and the theoretical tools we use for its analysis. Because of my commitment to keeping my work relevant to people in the Caribbean, I am constantly questioning how I can help others articulate their realities, if I can’t get my head around theoretical texts without feeling some level of inadequacy? Having posed such questions, I think it is important for me to try to address them, through my own research.

This paper discusses my current studies around the theme of black magic. This research is not, as some have supposed, and the dictionary suggests, an exploration of “magic attempted for evil purposes, calling upon evil spirits or the Devil.”2 Neither does it focus on ‘voodoo’ or some other black spiritual experience. Rather, my reading of Black Magic is to do with links between European and African diaspora thought structures as applied to Western art history and as such it brings a new and different meaning to the term Black Magic with little historical precedent. It is a theoretical approach and collective title for a series of essays that discuss the relationship between two cultures; their shared superstitions and imagery.

The working title for this series of essays is Black Magic: Representing Race from Ra to Rastafari. And whereas the term black magic, might reflect its European arcane and medieval origins, its relationship to other issues of representation, race and the study of black visual history invites a leap into subject matter that is less known. This sense of a quest to explore the unfamiliar is deliberately provoked by the term black itself that has historically been linked with darkness and mystery. The abracadabra type leap that the reader/viewer makes from notions of magic to black culture is one that Black Magic will explore even as it is challenged. In this way, I hope that the title aptly reflects the process involved in recovering and piecing together secrets of a hidden history. The method is intended to be magical moving from the known to the unknown like a magician summoning up images from the dark.