“Do you goe through the trees or over them?” asked Tituba’s interrogators in Salem Village. Her reply: “We see nothing but are there presently.” It is true of both 1692 and the present day that an especially mobile woman might be accused of witchcraft. With an eye for Tituba’s various flights, this paper reads the geographies of Tituba’s life before, during and after the Salem, Massachusetts witchcraft trials. Both the uncleared forests of Naumkeag Territory and the heavily surveilled plantations of Barbados form the backdrop of both her trial testimony and scholarship of Salem’s famous witch-hunts. This talk reckons with these two sites as they were historically contrasted, alongside additional places Tituba is imagined to have spent time: the Parris household, the courthouse, the prison, the Caribbean colonies. Attention to Tituba’s geography begins to unpack conflicting representations of her race and ethnicity over time, helping us reckon with her legacy as a Black or Indian “witch” of interest to scholars and artists alike. What produces the desire to confirm Tituba’s race, and what is at stake in using geography to determine it?
SJ Zhang is Assistant Professor, English, at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching are both concerned with seventeenth through nineteenth-century archives of slavery and marronage in the United States and Caribbean. She is interested in how resistance practices and flight from enslavement by Black and Native individuals in the Caribbean and North America shaped textual and visual production in the colonial period. She teaches transnational literary histories of slave and maroon narratives, constructions of gender, race and forms of bondage before 1850, as well as courses on archival theory and method.
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