In Haitian Vodou, spirits impact Black practitioners' everyday lives, tightly connecting the sacred and the secular. As Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha reveals in Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (UNC Press, 2023), that connection is manifest in the dynamic relationship between public religious ceremonies, material aesthetics, bodily adornment, and spirit possession. Nwokocha spent more than a decade observing Vodou ceremonies from Montreal and New York to Miami and Port-au-Prince. She engaged particularly with a Haitian practitioner and former fashion designer, Manbo Maude, who presided over Vodou temples in Mattapan, Massachusetts, and Jacmel, Haiti. With vivid description and nuanced analysis, Nwokocha shows how Manbo Maude's use of dress and her production of ritual garments are key to serving Black gods and illuminate a larger transnational economy of fashion and spiritual exchange.
Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha is assistant professor of religion at the University of Miami.
Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
Alka Vaid Menon, "Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards" (U California Press, 2023)
Judith Fathallah, "Killer Fandom: Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer" (Mediastudies Press, 2023)
Jared D. Margulies, "The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland, "Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats" (Penn State UP, 2023)
James St. André, "Conceptualising China through Translation" (Manchester UP, 2023)
Ofer Sharone, "The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Guido Parietti, "On the Concept of Power: Possibility, Necessity, Politics" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Joseph C. Russo, "Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas" (Duke UP, 2022)
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Pete Barbrook-Johnson and Alexandra S. Penn, "Systems Mapping: How to Build and Use Causal Models of Systems" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
Aniefiok Ekpoudom, "Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain" (Faber and Faber, 2024)
Thomas Baudinette, "Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Dana R. Fisher, "Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Jennifer V. Evans, "The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism" (Duke UP, 2023)
Tulasi Srinivas, "Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics" (SUNY Press, 2023)
Vera Lazzaretti and Kathinka Frøystad, "Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence: Rethinking Religious Offence and Its Containment" (Routledge, 2022)
Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle, "Grave History: Death, Race, and Gender in Southern Cemeteries" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
Thomas DeGloma, "Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Till Hilmar, "Deserved: Economic Memories After the Fall of the Iron Curtain" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Rita Kesselring, "Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa" (Stanford UP, 2017)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies
New Books in Islamic Studies