The introduction insists that Black placemaking is an important complement to studies of African diasporic migration. It situates this book within the historiography of family, US southern, and African diasporic scholarship, recounts archival and other research methodologies, and reflects on the books overall significance.

The Conclusion reviews Plath’s engagement with the supernatural within the political, cultural, and literary context of post-war America and Britain. It summarises the nuances of concepts like witch, witchcraft, black and white magic, and their relation to gender and power. The Conclusion also emphasises the importance of examining Plath’s manuscripts and additional archival materials, which her demonstrate continuous interest in magical themes around gender power dynamics. Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural concludes that the re-examination of Plath’s works with an approach of the supernatural is timely and significant not only for Plath scholarship but for literary studies. It positions the comprehensive analysis of this book in the historical reckoning with witch trials and reflects on the lasting relationship between the language of magic and poetry.

Oral history with Veronica about her Mardi Gras Indian memorial suit, her ancestors, and masking traditions as ways of performing history and memory

Amid 20th-century global decolonization movements, Black and white organizers in the Lower Mississippi Valley challenged the economic exploitation and voter suppression of Jim Crow. In the early 1960s organizers with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) supported West Feliciana sweet potato farmers who organized against a canning company whom they accused of using contracts to intimidate Black voters, and in October Rev. Joe Carter became the first Black person to register to vote in West Feliciana since 1902. Yet the reaction was swift, culminating in David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in the early 1990s. The linear passage of time does not guarantee progress; but if the forces of reaction are nimble, so are we. And there is joy to be found in that simple truth.

The Introduction situates Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural within the current scholarship of Plath studies along with the recent new publications of Plath’s works. It introduces the purpose of the book and reviews the previous, often misguided approaches to Plath’s relationship to the supernatural and the occult. The Introduction emphasises the new approach of bringing together literary studies with the framework of the early modern witch trials and historical studies on witchcraft to interrogate the full extent Plath engaged with the political, cultural, and literary heritages of the European and American witch-hunts. Across seven chapters, this book reviews the way in which gender, magic, and power intersect in her poetry and prose contextualised within the post-war era.

Chapter 1 situates Plath’s work within McCarthyism (anti-Communist witch-hunt) and looks at her knowledge of the Salem witch trials, from American literature to her encounters with contemporary political discourses. The chapter examines Plath’s poems inspired by the early modern witch-hunt, such as ‘Witch Burning’ and ‘The Times Are Tidy,’ and considers her employment of the witch figure as a metaphor for political and gender nonconformists during the Cold War, seeking inspiration the trials of witches and the Rosenbergs. The chapter then comparatively reads Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) and Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible (1953), arguing that Plath draws on the concept of witch-hunt as an abuse of institutional power, which was parallelled with McCarthyism and the return to Puritanical morals in post-war America. The chapter reviews Plath’s historical, literary, and political engagement with the legacies of the Salem witch trials and offers an understanding of her poetic deployment of the witch figure.

This chapter shows how settlers commanded enslaved labor to implant a slaveholding society on Native lands. The Harrell family, for example, migrated from South Carolina to Spanish West Florida starting in 1802. They and their contemporaries forced captives from Africa, the Caribbean, continental North America, and even one from China to perform the arduous labor of implanting a society. In the West Florida Rebellion of 1810, a small group of colonists revolted against Spanish officials and briefly maintained independence before being annexed by the US. One year later Africans launched a spectacular revolt of their own in the German Coast Rebellion of 1811. After defeat by public and private armed forces, statehood, and the War of 1812, the region became integrated into the early republic.

Chapter 4 discusses the literary, cultural, and political influence of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Faust legend in the works of Plath and her contemporaries. The chapter examines Plath’s textual engagement with Faustian plays and the way in which she seeks inspiration from the themes of the texts from her juvenilia until her late poetry. The historical, religious, psychoanalytical, and political interpretations of demons, demonic possession, and diabolism were present in post-war discourses, borrowing the vocabulary from the well-known play about a black magician and Mephistopheles. The chapter revises over-simplified narratives around Plath’s use of vocabulary associated with diabolism to show her knowledge of the subject that influenced her and demonstrates that American poets, such as Anne Sexton, Karl Shapiro, and John Berryman also employed Faustian themes in their poetry. It concludes that the Faust legend had significant role in post-war literature and culture, re-interpreting the meaning of diabolism and sin within the mid-century political landscape.

Chapter 3 describes the influence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Tempest on Plath’s poetry and prose, focusing on the gendered concepts of witchcraft and magic. The chapter contextualises Plath’s depiction of maternal malice and paternal control in the framework of twentieth-century interpretations of Macbeth’s witches and Prospero from The Tempest. It addresses the mythological origins of the female trio as metaphysical beings with divinatory powers who, for Plath, embody the inescapable maternal presence. The chapter outlines the similarities between Prospero’s magical power and the beekeeping of Plath’s father figure as a magical-scholarly power. In her writings, likewise seeks inspiration from her childhood, reimagining her Atlantic seascape as the magic island from The Tempest in which Prosperoean father emerges as an idealised and dominant figure. The chapter concludes that Plath’s allusions to the early modern supernatural figures were shaped and paralleled by post-war interpretations and poetic retellings. They reflect on the gendered understanding of magical power as a sinister and benevolent controlling force.

Chapter 6 introduces the concepts associated with supernatural transformations, metamorphosis, shapeshifting, and hybridity, each expressing a different approach to the transformation of the female body. Plath’s poems frequently seek inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which she interrogates the powerlessness of women who transform from human to vegetal form. The chapter situates Plath’s poetic narratives among her female contemporaries, such as Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and even Margaret Atwood, who rely on feminist retellings of classical myths to question concerns about women’s autonomy and social position. The chapter outlines Plath’s employment of the concept of shapeshifting, associated with witches and folkloric beliefs, to reflect on the liberatory powers the animal form (often flying creatures) offers to women. It also argues that Plath experiments with the fluid boundaries between the human and the nonhuman in one of her most well-known poems, ‘Ariel,’ which portrays an imaginative flying motion as transformation.

In the 1850s planters envisioned not a metaphorical but an actual “plantation future” pleasured in the society that slavery built. They enjoyed what would soon be called “conspicuous consumption” when they bought possessions for their households, patronized the arts, and supported other activities that reinforced the culture of white supremacy. Yet they knew that deep inequality threatened social stability. In East Feliciana, leaders auctioned white paupers and their labor, used the Overseers of the Poor to assist the impoverished, and even doled out fellowships to medical school. Meanwhile enslaved persons drew on existing internal resources to protest the planter’s future in real time. As they survived and gossiped, dared to experience Black joy amid unspeakable suffering, set fires and ran away, they situated the Felicianas within a world of abolitionist activism.