From Hoodoo Women to Robber Queens

Throughout her career as an ethnographer, Zora Neale Hurston sought to capture the performances that linked African American folk communities of the coastal South to those she encountered in the Caribbean. The conjure woman of New Orleans and the Mambo priestess of Haitian Vodou exhibited performances that dramatized shared cultural and historical memory. By situating the conjure woman in the Marvelous Real, Hurston created a fictive site in which the conjurer acts as the interlocutor of women’s narratives and showed how identity could be shaped more directly by shared cultural memory than by geographic bounds. This project explores how authors Erna Brodber and Nalo Hopkinson have since enlarged on Hurston’s model of the conjure woman-as-ethnographer in the genres of Magical Realist and Speculative fiction.