The Antigua Sugar Mills project this semester continues the research work we did in Antigua this summer focusing on the enslaved people that work on the different plantations, including their day to day activities and how it shapes the country today, and restructuring the website to have a particular section on the culture with a subsection on religion, different gatherings, and music.
Over the summer, we learned a lot of things about the enslaved people and Antigua in general. One of the things that we discovered and had to add to the website was the religious practices of the enslaved people that worked the land.
Obeah, which was very popular among the enslaved people, was a somewhat spiritual practice that involved channeling supernatural forces and spirits for ultimate personal empowerment. We learned that the enslaved people used it a lot in their day to day activities as a type of protection against their enslavers and other people. We were able to start a page on the website focusing fully on this spiritual practice. https://sugarmills.blogs.bucknell.edu/culture/
We then added another section on the influence of West Africa on the culture. We talked about the different potteries, food distribution and household ways.
We were also able to update the bibliography with works from some incredible authors we learned about in Antigua, thanks to the help of Joanne C. Hillhouse, an author we were honored to interview during our time there. Moving forward, we hope the next phase of research will focus on the market spaces and how various unions were developed from these spaces, eventually leading to independence.
—Barbara Wankollie ’25