conjuring trick

plural conjuring tricks

1. A type of magic trick in which something is made to appear or disappear.

   1 more example

   Instead, as literary scholar Kate Shanley has argued, American Indians are “a permanent ‘present absence’ in U.S. colonial imagination, an ‘absence’ that reinforces at every turn the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified.” Literary imagination played a significant part in this conjuring trick, and scholars have identified the significance of works such as those by James Fenimore Cooper.

   2014, Gunlög Fur, “Indians and Immigrants — Entangled Histories”, in Journal of American Ethnic History