Quick Take
- Narration: Adenrele Ojo brings warmth and authority to Stewart’s blend of scholarship and storytelling, her voice holding the book’s tonal range from academic history to oral tradition without strain.
- Themes: Black women’s spiritual practices, cultural preservation under oppression, the hidden origins of American material culture
- Mood: Revelatory and celebratory, with scholarly rigor underneath the wonder.
- Verdict: A genuinely original reframing of American history through the lens of conjure women, documenting connections between African spiritual tradition and everyday American life most listeners will never have considered.
A few months ago, a friend mentioned in passing that the original Little Mermaid story had African roots in American Louisiana, something about the Oshun tradition and the specific way the Disney film arrived at its coastal-magic aesthetic. I had no frame for that claim and let it go. Then I listened to The Conjuring of America, and I spent a Saturday afternoon texting that same friend about everything I was learning, because Lindsey Stewart does something that very few academic historians manage: she makes the footnotes feel like revelations.
The book covers roughly four centuries of Black women’s spiritual and healing practice in America, from the enslaved women who maintained African religious traditions in the antebellum South through the Voodoo Queens of Reconstruction New Orleans through the Granny Midwives of the Jim Crow era. The argument is ambitious: that these women, working in secrecy because their practices were actively criminalized, created the cultural substrate from which enormous swaths of American life grew, from specific herbal medicines that fed into commercial pharmaceutical culture to the textile innovations that gave us denim to the specific origin story of what became Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix. Stewart documents these connections with enough specificity to make the claims stick rather than feel like motivated historical projection.
Adenrele Ojo and the Requirement of the Right Voice
This book needed a narrator who could hold the dual register of scholarship and testimony simultaneously, someone who could deliver academic citation with the same rhythmic authority as an oral account, because Stewart herself writes in both modes at once. Ojo manages this transition fluently. Her voice has an inherent warmth that suits a book about tradition and preservation and love, but she never lets that warmth soften the analytical material. The chapters on how conjure was regulated, criminalized, and then repackaged for commercial profit without attribution are among the most sobering in the book, and Ojo reads them with appropriate weight without retreating into cool academic neutrality.
Reviewer A.B. notes that the book works well for commute listening, which I can confirm, though I’d add a qualification: the chapters drawing on letters from enslaved women and African religious lore require more concentrated attention than commute conditions usually allow. The book can be followed in a car or on a walk, but its full effect is proportional to the attention you bring.
What Gets Unlocked When You Follow the Threads
The most startling section for me was the chapter on Vicks VapoRub, a product so familiar as to seem like it has always existed in the cultural background noise of American illness. Stewart’s account of the herbal knowledge that passed through enslaved women’s healing practices into the commercial formula that eventually became the mentholated chest rub sitting in everyone’s medicine cabinet is an object lesson in how thoroughly the mechanisms of cultural appropriation can erase their sources. The Disney connection, involving the specific religious tradition of Oshun and the design choices behind the 2023 Little Mermaid, is documented with the same care and is equally unexpected for listeners who have not encountered this scholarship before.
Reviewer sreada’s description of the book as a 400-year history of traditional medicine practices is accurate but undersells it slightly. It is also a political history of how knowledge moves between dominated and dominant cultures, a theological history of how African spiritual traditions transformed under extreme pressure and survived, and a feminist history of labor that was performed by women the dominant culture refused to recognize as fully human. Stewart is doing all of this simultaneously, and the fact that it holds together as a readable book rather than collapsing under its own ambition is a significant achievement.
The Scholarly Foundation and Its Transparency
Stewart is a philosopher by training, author of The Politics of Black Joy, and her academic credentials are present in the book’s architecture. The argument is built carefully, with sourcing, and she is transparent about where the documentary record ends and interpretation begins. This transparency, rare in popular academic history, is particularly valuable in a book making claims that will be new to most listeners. When Stewart says that enslaved women’s letters document specific practices, she provides enough of those letters in the text that the listener can evaluate the interpretive leap rather than simply accepting it.
Reviewer The Buchanans’ reaction, describing the book as unlocking a new layer of deception around practices that were natural and then repackaged, gets at the emotional experience of the book’s central argument. Stewart is not making a pity narrative about Black suffering. She is making an argument about power, creativity, survival, and the systematic misattribution of cultural innovation that shaped American life.
Who Will Find This Indispensable
Listeners interested in African American history who want material that goes beyond the familiar narratives. Readers of books like Toni Morrison’s work, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, or Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project who are looking for thematic companions. Anyone who has wondered about the deep roots of American folk medicine, folk religion, or the specific aesthetic choices of popular culture that turn out to have much older sources. Those seeking conventional military or political history will find this a different genre, more cultural and philosophical. That difference is the book’s entire point.
Frequently Asked Questions
How academic is The Conjuring of America? Is it accessible to general readers or primarily for scholars?
Stewart writes accessibly, and the book is clearly intended for a general educated audience rather than a specialist academic one. It has a scholarly foundation with documented sourcing and careful argument, but the prose is engaging rather than technical. Most listeners will follow it comfortably.
Does the book require background knowledge of African American spiritual traditions like Voodoo or Oshun worship?
No. Stewart introduces each tradition as she encounters it in the historical narrative, providing enough context for listeners with no prior knowledge. The introductions are respectful and sufficient without being condescending.
How does the Disney and Vicks VapoRub material connect to a serious historical argument?
Stewart documents both connections with specific historical evidence rather than assertion. The Disney material draws on the Oshun tradition in Louisiana Creole culture and its documented influence on the aesthetic choices behind the 2023 film. The VapoRub connection traces specific herbal compounds through the commercial development record. Both feel earned rather than speculative.
Is Adenrele Ojo a familiar narrator, and does her casting reflect the material?
Ojo is a British-Nigerian actress and narrator whose cultural background suits the material. Her narration of African theological material and oral tradition carries a credibility that a more generic narrator would struggle to match, and her voice has the warmth the book’s celebratory dimension requires.
