Viperine Ecologies, Obeah, Hermeneutical Insurgence: Robert Wedderburn’s Afrodiasporic Audience

Son of the “rebellious” Rosanna, and grandson of an obeah woman, ‘Talkee Amy’, Robert Wedderburn was a formerly enslaved ultra-radical prophet, pamphleteer, and anti-abolitionist campaigner who migrated to England from Jamaica in 1778. A recent uptick in Wedderburn scholarship, in the words of Shelby Johnson, centers “Caribbean history in our approaches to Wedderburn, whose career in London looms large in critical assessments of his work.” However, even this tradition overlooks the place of Black political actors in Wedderburn’s audiences. By reading spy reports of “West Indian” attendees at Wedderburn’s debates and his frequent address of “ye Africans” in his periodical The Axe Laid to the Root, I argue there is an important difference between approaching Caribbean history as a means of explaining where Wedderburn’s political orientations came from versus regarding the Caribbean as a place where Afrodiasporic people developed critical apparatuses of their own which were themselves used to interpret Wedderburn’s work in his own time. By reapproaching Wedderburn’s archives through interpretive frameworks that may have been available to his Afro-Caribbean audiences, I argue Wedderburn curated spaces of Black political belonging through which Black political agents circulated Black political thought around the Atlantic world of his time.