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
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)
Kate Maclean, "Cash, Clothes, and Construction: Rethinking Value in Bolivia's Pluri-economy" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Gina Sipley, "Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice" (Bristol UP, 2024)
Karen Pechilis et al. ed., "Devotional Visualities: Seeing Bhakti in Indic Material Cultures" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Hemjyoti Medhi, "Gendered Publics: Chandraprava Saikiani and the Mahila Samiti in Colonial Assam" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Ariana Mangual Figueroa, "Knowing Silence: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
Sreeparna Chattopadhyay, "The Gravity of Hope" (Crossed Arrows, 2023)
Matilda Bickers, "Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex" (PM Press, 2023)
Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, "The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games" (MIT Press, 2024)
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