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
Lamia Karim, "Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans, "The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels" (Crown, 2024)
Premilla Nadasen, "Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" (Haymarket Books, 2023)
Nicholas Hoover Wilson and Damon Mayrl, "After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Netta Avineri and Patricia Baquedano-López, "An Introduction to Language and Social Justice: What Is, What Has Been, and What Could Be" (Routledge, 2023)
Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton, "The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison" (Routledge, 2023)
Cathy Stanton, "Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
Timothy P. A. Cooper, "Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Mark Robert Rank, "The Poverty Paradox: Understanding Economic Hardship Amid American Prosperity" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Elise Andaya, "Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice" (NYU Press, 2024)
Raven Simone Maragh-Lloyd, "Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2024)
Marina Welker, "Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia" (U California Press, 2024)
Catherine D'Ignazio, "Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action" (MIT Press, 2024)
Miguel A. Martínez, "Research Handbook on Urban Sociology" (Edward Elgar, 2024)
Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia, "The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice" (MIT Press, 2024)
Kevin Woodson, "The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Ketaki Chowkhani, "The Limits of Sexuality Education: Love, Sex, and Adolescent Masculinities in Urban India" (Routledge, 2024)
Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, "The Chosen We: Black Women's Empowerment in Higher Education" (SUNY Press, 2023)
Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming, "Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life" (Routledge, 2023)
Alissa Quart, "Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream" (Ecco Press, 2023)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Psychology
New Books in Economics
New Books in Anthropology