"White Men's Magic profoundly transforms studies of the encounters between the North Atlantic and Black African worlds. In challenging the canonical reading of scriptures, Wimbush invents a new word. 'Scripturalization' is his inspired term to explicate the normalization of constructed meanings, veiling the social and political forces that control their interpretation. Wimbush's innovative method ties the life of the Bible irrevocably to the wider history of slavery and transatlantic movements. The black slave Equiano's autobiography will never be read in the same way again."--Gauri Viswanathan, author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief "Wimbush has given us a remarkable and generative close reading: one which rightly repositions religion from the academic periphery to the core of Equiano's struggle to turn the key fetish of eighteenth-century Britain, the King James Bible, into an avenue of transformation for himself and other 'strangers' in the North Atlantic world. Further, drawing on his own experience and extensive knowledge of African American history he closes the conventional gap between the Black Atlantic elite and black folk as both make more of 'making do,' with the bible as a durable hub of power amid the shifting complexities of diaspora."--Grey Gundaker, Duane A.

and Virginia S. Dittman Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, The College of William & Mary "A wonderfully ex-centric book, seeking through the eighteenth century Olaudah Equiano's very 'interesting narrative' about himself to disentangle us all from the enslaving weave of early modern European black and white essentialisms underwriting still our fraught politics of identity. Wimbush puts unrelenting pressure on the sciatic 'scripturalized' nerve of this body politic. Many will yelp, I'm sure, repeatedly, underway toward a less up-tight, more mobile sense of our fledgling selves."--Leif E. Vaage, Associate Professor of New Testament, Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto.