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
Work-from-Home is Here to Stay: Call for Flexibility in Post-pandemic Work Policies
Michelle Gordon and Rachel O ́Sullivan, "Colonial Paradigms of Violence: Comparative Analysis of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Killing" (Wallstein, 2022)
The (ir)Rational Mob: On the Life and Legacy of Gustave Le Bon
Erin Lin, "When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Sean Redmond, "The Loneliness Room: A Creative Ethnography of Loneliness" (Manchester UP, 2024)
Frederick Klaits et al., "Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Saqib Khan, "Tribe-Class Linkages: The History and Politics of the Agrarian Movement in Tripura" (Routledge, 2024)
Life in a New Language, Part 3: African Migrants
Thomas Hendriks, "Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession" (Duke UP, 2021)
A Psychoanalytic Overview of Racism in America
Living with Digital Surveillance in China
Christopher T. Conner and David R. Dickens, "Electronic Dance Music: From Deviant Subculture to Culture Industry" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
Pinky Hota, "The Violence of Recognition: Adivasi Indigeneity and Anti-Dalitness in India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
Adrian Johnston, "Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Anahit Behrooz, "BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship" (404 Ink, 2023)
Life in a New Language, Part 2: Work
Alex V. Barnard, "Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness" (Columbia UP, 2023)
danah boyd on Digital Technology and Everyday Life
Kira Huju, "Cosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Lisa M. P. Munoz, "Women in Science Now: Stories and Strategies for Achieving Equity" (Columbia UP, 2023)
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