Introduction by Steven Hopkins

Warm greetings to the Class of 2025, to your families and your friends.

As in so many past years, our silence this morning brings many emotions to this place, to these magnificent trees, to this air we breathe, and to our hearts. Our happiness, relief, regret, joy, pride, love, that certain nervous anticipation, both excitement and a bit of fear of what lies ahead. And this morning, in our silence, we are able perhaps, in the Quaker tradition, to imagine peace, a peace that, like our silence, is not simply an absence of conflict, war, a lack of words or action, but an active benevolent force, the very breath of a true word spoken.

We hold in our hearts those who have little to celebrate this morning, those who are captive, those who are starving, subjected to arbitrary political violence.

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It is my great pleasure to introduce to you this afternoon my beloved colleague in the Department of Religion, Professor Yvonne Chireau.

Yvonne is one of the brightest scholars of her generation working in the field of African American Religion, and her single book, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjure Tradition, has emerged as one of the most important studies of religion, healing, and material culture in African American Studies. Yvonne is praised by her contemporaries as someone with a bright intellect and an “exhaustive curiosity,” a scholar who weds intellectual rigor with elegance and creativity and who deftly puts into balance the values – sometimes seen as antithetical – of the historian and culture-critic/phenomenologist of religion. Her academic audiences come from a variety of disciplines in her work on “conjure” traditions, religion, “magic,” the body, healing, cursing, and material culture in African American history. Black Magic is described as “ground breaking,” “assiduously researched,” and “gracefully written,” and has come to be actively used in graduate and undergraduate courses by a variety of scholars in the field.

It is Yvonne’s nuanced views on conjure practice in America that will leave a lasting impact on her field of study — conjure as ideology, pathology, folklore, commodity, or racial trope, and her analysis of various ritual forms that conjure may embrace, along with its persistence due to what Yvonne describes as its “effacement of the unstable boundaries between religion, intellectual orientation, and popular belief.” Conjure as practice and category, as Chireau studies it, strikes at the core of fundamental aspects of religion, and even more so, lived religiousness and its many vicissitudes.

Her fine essay on the “Body as Menagerie,” a richly argued, close-read study of various “animal” invaders – snakes, salamanders, frogs, scorpions, worms, snails — in the porous bodies of the sick in African American healing accounts, is a personal favorite. Her depiction of the “conjure body,” in its porousness and vulnerability, its openness to a world of dangerous, but also potentially healing powers, has many resonances with my own work and teaching on South Indian Hindu, Sri Lankan Buddhist, and traditional vernacular Chinese ideas of misfortune, lament and loss, possession, and the blurred boundaries between the living and the dead, the human, natural, and animal worlds.

Yvonne has introduced many of our students to the academic study of religion in America, in its Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic forms, and in some notable cases, inspired our students to go on in her field, to graduate school and beyond. As one student remarks: “Her class inspired me to apply for a Fulbright to study indigenous African divination rituals in Senegal — a topic I would never even have formulated before our discussion.” She is described as an “exemplary facilitator" and “engaging moderator,” someone who manages classroom conversations “in a way that [makes students] feel valued, respected, and listened to.” Many students mention Yvonne’s effective use of films, music, visual art, multimedia web sources, including streaming video, along with guest lectures in her courses, materials that provide vivid experiential elements to the classroom and to the subject matter, bringing it all alive. Students also note that Yvonne brings to the Department of Religion and to the Swarthmore curriculum in general critical diversity of subject matter, something still all too rare even in our most contemporary liberal arts settings in the United States. Many of her students recall with some surprise after leaving Swarthmore that what Yvonne gives to us here so abundantly is so rare in other institutions, and I might also say, is threatened by our own government in its current assault on higher education. Yvonne is challenging, but also “encouraging, nurturing, imaginative, and kind;” she enables students “as learners to build beyond basic facts and to see religion as a living, breathing reality.” One student refers to Yvonne’s ability to affirm and to call into question what folks derive from their religious traditions, inspiring students to appreciate “the ruptures with those traditions and the complicatedness of faith.” Yvonne’s courses articulate how religion is a source of “vitality,” “creativity,” and also of “subversion.”

Finally. I might mention, along with Yvonne’s contributions to African American religion in Black Zion, the volume co-edited with our former colleague in Religion Nathaniel Deutsch, her work on conjure traditions in Hoodoo, which led to her becoming a consultant for Ryan Coogler for his recent critically acclaimed film Sinners, in spite of claiming: “I don’t do ‘horror’ Ryan Coogler!” — and her ongoing book project on race and religion in comics and the graphic novel. 

Yvonne is one of the very few faculty members in my years here at Swarthmore who loves the singer-songwriter Laura Nyro as much as I do ... and “That’s what Mother Spiritual Is” . . . Thank you, Yvonne, for showing us what Mother Spiritual has done!

Yvonne, thank you for the food and the films,
for the altars that drew so many of us back to our ancestors, 
the candles, the masks and the family photographs, 
the beloved dead, a father, a mother, brother or grandmother, 
holy Guadalupe, Samhain and All Souls, that dragon and his St. George.

Yvonne, you may not "do horror,” but you have always done “magic!” 

It’s my pleasure to introduce the Peggy Chan Emerita Professor of Black Studies and Professor Emerita of Religion Yvonne Chireau.