This essay focuses on selected works of fictional prose, published between the close of the eighteenth century and the opening of the twentieth, that explicitly treat Obeah in their elucidations of Caribbean life and expressions of anxiety ushered in by the Haitian Revolution and pending abolition of plantation slavery. ‘Obeah’, the term used for African-Caribbean ‘slave magic', is developed in these works as a literary and cultural signifier of tensions between waning European imperial power and African rebellion, between ‘black Obi’ and ‘white sugar'. This essay explores fictional representations of Obeah in and around the nineteenth century, from William Earle's Obi (1800) to Herbert de Lisser's The White Witch of Rosehall (1929), that reveal the development of Obeah during this time as a distinctly Caribbean counterculture that challenged the supposedly supreme authority of plantocratic power and become a metonym for black political agency within and beyond the discourse that would deny it those claims.

This essay discusses the manner in which the romance is reconfigured in the West Indies and offers some generalized contexts and discussions as a way of formulating a working definition for the genre of the West Indian Romance. It examines the evolution of the West Indian romance during the period 1827–1917 and investigates the emergence and development of the West Indian romance, first, during the immediate pre- and post-Emancipation period, 1820–1860, and then from 1865 to 1918. It develops this discussion by using William Hamley’s Captain Clutterbuck’s Champagne: A West Indian Reminiscence (1862). This British version of the 'West Indian romance' is balanced against a reading of Stephen Cobham’s Rupert Gray: A Tale in Black and White (1907) with the aim of demonstrating the production of a West Indian romance in the modern colonial period by West Indian writers. Each of these perspectives provides a kaleidoscope of feelings that allows for a more comprehensive understanding of how the romance emerged and functioned.