Other than autobiographies by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written By Himself is probably the most widely known freedom narrative. According to Vincent Wimbush, Equiano's two-volume work should be particularly interesting to scholars of religion and race. It was not simply a conversion narrative or a travelogue through the violent contact zones of the colonial Atlantic world. Rather, in it Equiano identified how the British created an overarching social-political and discursive regime rooted in the Bible. After unmasking this regime—a process and product that Wimbush calls “scripturalization”—Equiano then crafted an anti-colonialist religiosity that allows readers to move beyond white supremacist colonial faith structures.

White Men's Magic does not follow Equiano's entire life. It centers instead upon several key moments in his narrative. There is Equiano's juxtaposition of the British and the Igbo to show how both relied on senses of the sacred to define their realms. Then, there is Equiano's conversation with a Catholic priest where he highlighted the literary Bible-centeredness of British Protestantism and described why Catholicism did not appeal to him. Equiano's encounter with a tribe of Native Americans in Jamaica is a third touchstone moment for Wimbush where Equiano identified himself as “almost an Englishman.”

From these moments Wimbush suggests that Equiano recognized British Protestantism's fetishization of the Bible and how it created an entire sphere of meaning, orientation, law, discourse, mores, and rules. Living within such a regime, one must not only become literate to understand or subvert the social norms, but also recognize the powerful functions of literacy. She or he must not only refashion Protestant Christianity, but also first comprehend how it politically bonded British peoples into a nation-state. Finally, for Equiano, these recognitions allowed him to have a “conversion” experience where he converted neither to God nor God to himself. Instead, his conversion was the creation of a new set of eyes and texts that could undermine whites’ hegemony through mimetic parody.

There are a number of crucial interpretive interventions in White Men's Magic. First, Wimbush demonstrates the importance of moving from studying how a scripture influences a society to uncovering scripturalization, the process and power of how particular scriptures were used to structure the totality of a community. Second, Wimbush's religious studies approach parallels nicely the theological work recently done by J. Cameron Carter and Willie Jennings who have dissected how western Christianity became infected with racism during the age of colonial contacts. Third, by emphasizing the history of religions, Wimbush moves the conversation from a simple binary of white-European-colonialist versus black-African-other. While race and geography were crucial to Equiano's assessment of “white men's magic,” so too were the differences between Protestants and Catholics. Finally, Wimbush offers an African American religious history that emphasizes literary text instead of song like Du Bois, everyday vernacularisms like Zora Neale Hurston and Houston Baker, or the haunted past imagined through novels of Toni Morrison.

Theoretically, Wimbush is most influenced by semiotician Yuri M. Lotman and anthropologist Michael Taussig. Known for his work on semiotic systems, Lotman has argued that “semiospheres” are formed to create coherent communities and to provide new information or perspectives. In the case of Equiano, Wimbush argues that this former slave was the first to identify the semiosphere of British Colonial Protestantism and to tinker with alternative or new meanings through the creation of another semiosphere. Then, building upon Taussig's work on mimetics, Wimbush argues that Equiano's work was an example of “mimetic excess” where he turned the codes and mores of the white world back upon itself with vengeance. When he claimed to have exerted power over Native Americans in Jamaica, for instance, Equiano was putting on gross display the performative powers of white men.

Ultimately, White Men's Magic is a useful book for any scholar interested in the ways race influenced colonial contacts and the emergence of modernity. It should be read by scholars of the Atlantic World, and it provides excellent tools to interrogate texts from other writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.