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
Kunal Purohit, "H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars" (HarperCollins, 2023)
Language Makes the Place
Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Denielle A. Elliott, "Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
Laurence Cox et al., "Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements" (Edward Elgar, 2024)
Michael Stausberg, "Religions, Mumbai Style: Events-Media-Spaces" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Jenna Ng, "The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)
Amira Mittermaier, "Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times" (U California Press, 2019)
Yamini Narayanan, "Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Richard A. Detweiler, "The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry, and Accomplishment" (MIT Press, 2021)
Joshua Paul Dale, "Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World" (Profile Books, 2023)
Anru Lee, "Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
John Horgan, "Terrorist Minds: The Psychology of Violent Extremism from Al-Qaeda to the Far Right" ( Columbia UP, 2023)
Bryce Henson, "Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil" (U Texas Press, 2023)
Calvin John Smiley, "Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition" (U California Press, 2023)
Steven High, "Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
Hedwig Amelia Waters, "Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands: A Proportional Share" (UCL Press, 2023)
Youjin B. Chung, "Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Vani Kant Borooah, "Economics, Religion and Happiness: God, Mammon and the Search for Spiritual and Financial Wealth" (Routledge, 2023)
Lisa L. Phillips et al., "Grassroots Activisms: Public Rhetorics in Localized Contexts" (Ohio State UP, 2024)
Courtney Brannon Donoghue, "The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere" (U Texas Press, 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