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This chapter assesses the concept of faux-dou, in contrast to the dominant framing of the art collective under the signs and symbols of Vodou. While actively resisting the art-historical reduction of the Grand Rue collective as merely productive of Vodou arts inspired by the lwas or spirits, Jean Hérard Celeur nevertheless does incorporate Vodou elements, but he does so in an ecstatic, métis (or mixed) fusion. Faux-dou, then, may be defined as a sort of “faux” Vodou or the artificial imposition or strategic marketing of the Grand Rue sculptors as “Vodou” artists: it functions, thus, as a sort of gallerist shorthand or even a facile fabrication that obscures the myriad, eclectic influences on the artists, particularly on Celeur and his wildly eclectic sculptures that are amalgams of aesthetic styles.

This essay explores the contemporary legacies of colonial religious discourses, by examining how participants in Haiti’s annual Rara festival—a Lenten carnival and public performance of Haitian Vodou—at once inherit and transform the anti-Jewish sentiments of the clergy in colonial Saint Domingue. Through an active identification with the Jews who “killed Jesus,” disenfranchised Haitians reinvent the European demonization of Jews and Africans, deconstructing colonial religious categories from within, in order to craft rituals of resistance to their country’s predominantly Catholic and mulatto elites.

This article examines the nineteenth century Haitian state’s penal prohibition of “le vaudoux” as a form of “sortilege” or spell. It studies how, in the face of unremitting white Western hostility and racist malign, successive post-revolutionary Haitian governments relied on juridical law both as a sign of political modernity and as a space for the repudiation of the so-called primitive in Haiti. The article focuses on two significant episodes of enforcement of these laws following the return of the Roman Catholic Church to Haiti in 1860. At this point, popular ritual practice fell, in effect, under a second punitive regime, even as the newly arrived foreign clergy also pressed the Haitian state for stricter enforcement of the laws already in place. I argue, however, that the application of what were frequently consolidated after 1860 as “les lois divines et humaines” against “le vaudoux” proved, repeatedly, to be impossible for both state and Church. The disparity between how this word was constructed through penal and ecclesiastical laws versus how it was popularly understood became the key point on which both the state’s and the Church’s campaigns against popular ritual invariably foundered.

This chapter examines the aesthetics of Vodou bricolage in the sculptures of André Eugène, Frantz Jacques (Guyodo), and Alex Louis. The Grand Rue, like so many impoverished neighborhoods in Haiti's capital, survives through the willed intelligence and creative production of local bricoleurs, those workers and day laborers who frequently produce without pay and grab what is available or near at hand in order to optimistically build what is needed. Infused as it is with the lore and lyric, proverbs and rituals, symbols and myths of Vodou, this process of creative production is a wildly resourceful tool for survival in the daily perilous encounters confronted by those living precarious lives in spite of poverty, despite disease, with hunger, and, too often, against the odds. Indeed, it is a will to thrive through an imaginative Vodou bricolage.

The demonstration for Abner Louima in 1997 in New York City marked a new stage in the growing involvement of Haitians in local politics. Many protest signs blamed Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for what happened to Louima, a victim of police brutality. Issues of secrecy, especially the malevolent kind, are overdetermined in relation to anything that has to do with Haiti, a country and culture that, in the eyes of white America, is virtually synonymous with black magic. The dense, racially charged images that public personalities and journalists called up so effortlessly in commentary on the cases of Louima and Amadou Diallo, who was shot and killed by New York City police, are representations constructed “in the shadow of the fetish”. Like the charms Haitian Vodou priestess and healer Mama Lola made to help Louima, they are wanga.

Félix Morisseau–Leroy's Antigòn an Kreyòl is ‘best understood as a staging of a Haitian historical drama rather than of a European drama staged in Haiti and as a postcolonial appropriation of foreign cultural material from within the cultural and political legacy of its appropriating culture, rather than as a simple adaptation’. Morrisseau–Leroy uses the Creole language and Vodou to ‘rethink the drama of the Haitian revolution and modernization’ in and on local terms. His conscious assertion of the legitimacy of Creole as a valid language of high culture, and one appropriate for the (re)production of a Greek classic, was a political act, as was his use of Vodou. This chapter points out that ‘the play effects a critique of modernity and national identity, contesting the meaning of modernity from within modernity's ideals, and not from the perspective of tradition: its recovery of Vodou, rather than a rejection of modernity, points to a recovery of the revolution's ideals’. In other words, his play is an assertion of an alternative modernity in and on Haitian terms.

Concludes by arguing that virtually all of the “racial” tropologies of the nineteenth century, which had never completely gone away anyway, surfaced with a vengeance in the popular media storm that followed in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake that practically destroyed the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince

This chapter discusses Carlos Esteban Deive's historical novel Viento Negro, bosque del caimán (Black Wind, Bois Caiman, 2002), which deals with the slave revolt of 1791 and its consequences for the Spanish side. Deive chronicles Toussaint Louverture's entrance to Santo Domingo and his decision to immediately abolish slavery, recasting it as a fugitive but glorious moment in the shared history of Hispaniola. He reconstructs the effects of the rebellion on Santo Domingo and depicts the borderland as a site for rich cross-cultural exchange. In recasting of Hispaniola's past, Deive revisits dominant discourses related to the magical world of the island and to the representation of Vodou, one of the many manifestations of the process of creolisation which shaped the life and culture of the slaves. In the Dominican Republic, Vodou has long been associated exclusively with Haiti.

This chapter investigates Katherine Dunham’s book-length ethnographies, Journey to Accompong (1946) and Island Possessed (1969), as autobiographical narratives that document the origins of her cross-cultural artistry. These texts recount Dunham’s experiences as a dance anthropologist in mid-1930s Jamaica and Haiti, shortly before she postponed her academic training to pursue a career on the stage and screen. Like Baker’s narratives, both works are highly reflexive and ambiguous and thus deserve recognition within an African American women’s autobiographical tradition. They position Dunham as a self-conscious narrator who immerses herself physically in the cultural practices that she has been assigned to record. Both texts therefore shed light on a much wider lifelong project, namely, Dunham’s attempt to legitimize Caribbean cultures by incorporating their dance rituals into concert dance.

Celia Weiss Bambara focuses on three dancemakers of different generations in early 21^st century Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Viviane Gauthier, Florencia Pierre, and Nicole Lumarque. Each of these Haitian choreographers and company heads has a different relationship to the religion of Vodou, important in their lives and work, and to the concept of indigenism, formulated in the early 20^th century by Haitian intellectuals, particularly Jean Price-Mars. Each has innovations—Gauthier uses the Haitian training technique, kultur physik, while Pierre and Lumarque fuse other elements and extend ideas of folklore to make contemporary pieces like “Chimin Kwaze,” a program by Pierre's company to which Bambara herself contributed and danced in. She concludes by mentioning other artists who have been taking Haitian dance into the 21^st century.

Martha Ellen Davis illustrates how the Dominican misterios, the spirits influenced by the Vodou of adjacent Haiti, and also the spirits of the dead manifest themselves to Dominican mediums trained to receive them. She reveals the procedures, ceremonies, dances, music, and distinctiveness of this and its relationship to Dominican folk Catholicism. Los misterios, like gagá, which Davis also discusses, are part of a continuum of spiritual practices in the Dominican Republic that Davis terms Vodú-spiritism, which range from the almost purely spiritual, as in the spiritism descended from Allan Kardec, to saints festivals mixing the spiritual and the material, to a spirituality with a strong material component that includes music, dance, and possession by los misterios.

This chapter analyzes the novels of Marie Chauvet to understand the social history of Haiti. Images of women, scenes of affectionate appropriation, and charades of love permeate the text of Chauvet's works. She wrote in order to refuse clarity, to attack assumptions of Haitian nationalism and historical identity, to knock down heroes, and to confront the embarrassing claims of color that plague Haitian society. The chapter also explores the ethnographic precision of Haitian novelists and explains that vodou, while often denounced as superstition, is anchored to the intelligible plot of Haitian nationalist thought.

In this chapter, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert considers the connection between environmental catastrophe and religious discourse. In “Gade nan mizè-a m tonbe”, a Vodou song dedicated to the lwa Bwa Nan Bwa (Tree in the Woods), the singer asks the spirit to look at the misery into which he has fallen. Guided by this affecting song, the chapter explores how Haiti’s faith in Vodou – already threatened by the nation’s severe environmental crisis – was badly shaken by the January 2010 earthquake and its aftermath. The song poignantly reminds us what Haiti’s severe deforestation has meant for religious practices and beliefs in the country. The chapter looks at the links between Haiti’s environmental predicament (the fate of its trees), its ongoing cholera outbreak, the crisis of faith unleashed by the January 2010 earthquake, and the nature of forest spirits like Bwa Nan Bwa.

This chapter explores the intersection of digital technologies and the public visibility of Vodou. It examines not only how digital technologies are used and understood by practitioners (including newcomers to the religion), but also how the affordances of digital technologies—the possibilities and limits generated by the interaction between technology and technology use—shape manifestations of Vodou in the digital public sphere. Because online Vodou encompasses both representation and practice, the chapter examines a range of instances where Vodou and technology intersect, both in the religious practices of adherents to the religion and also at the level of popular imagination.

Groundings lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for Istwa across the Water, defining the key concepts of istwa, tidalectics, and marasa, as well as Istwa across the Water’s orientation from within a Vodou episteme. It also provides an overview of the chapters.