A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou
A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou

Author: Benjamin Hebblethwaite

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1496835646

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Connecting four centuries of political, social, and religious history with fieldwork and language documentation, A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou analyzes Haitian Vodou’s African origins, transmission to Saint-Domingue, and promulgation through song in contemporary Haiti. Split into two sections, the African chapters focus on history, economics, and culture in Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda while scrutinizing the role of Europeans in fomenting tensions. The political, military, and slave trading histories of the kingdoms in the Bight of Benin reveal the circumstances of enslavement, including the geographies, ethnicities, languages, and cultures of enslavers and enslaved. The study of the spirits, rituals, structure, and music of the region’s religions sheds light on important sources for Haitian Vodou. Having royal, public, and private expressions, Vodun spirit-based traditions served as cultural systems that supported or contested power and enslavement. At once suppliers and victims of the European slave trade, the people of Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda deeply shaped the emergence of Haiti’s creolized culture. The Haitian chapters focus on Vodou’s Rada Rite (from Allada) and Gede Rite (from Abomey) through the songs of Rasin Figuier’s Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman’s Guede, legendary rasin compact discs released on Jean Altidor’s Miami label, Mass Konpa Records. All the Vodou songs on the discs are analyzed with a method dubbed “Vodou hermeneutics” that harnesses history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism, and ethnomusicology in order to advance a scholarly approach to Vodou songs.

Haitian Vodou
Haitian Vodou

Author: Patrick Bellegarde-Smith

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13:

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Haitian Vodou breaks away from European and American heuristic models for understanding a religio-philosophical system such as Vodou in order to form new approaches with an African ethos. The contributors to this volume, all Haitians, examine the potentially radical and transformative possibilities of the religious and philosophical ideologies of Vodou and locate its foundations more clearly within an African heritage. Essays examine Vodou's roles in organizing rural resistance; forming political values for the transformation of Haiti; teaching social norms, values, and standards; influencing Haitian culture through art and music; merging science with philosophy, both theoretically and in the healing arts; and forming the Haitian "manbo," or priest.

The Faces of the Gods
The Faces of the Gods

Author: Leslie G. Desmangles

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0807861014

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Vodou, the folk religion of Haiti, is a by-product of the contact between Roman Catholicism and African and Amerindian traditional religions. In this book, Leslie Desmangles analyzes the mythology and rituals of Vodou, focusing particularly on the inclusion of West African and European elements in Vodouisants' beliefs and practices. Desmangles sees Vodou not simply as a grafting of European religious traditions onto African stock, but as a true creole phenomenon, born out of the oppressive conditions of slavery and the necessary adaptation of slaves to a New World environment. Desmangles uses Haitian history to explain this phenomenon, paying particular attention to the role of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maroon communities in preserving African traditions and the attempts by the Catholic, educated elite to suppress African-based "superstitions." The result is a society in which one religion, Catholicism, is visible and official; the other, Vodou, is unofficial and largely secretive.

Istwa across the Water
Istwa across the Water

Author: Toni Pressley-Sanon

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2022-01-03

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 0813072204

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Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Haiti-Dominican Republic Section Isis Duarte Book Prize Gathering oral stories and visual art from Haiti and two of its "motherlands" in Africa, Istwa across the Water recovers the submerged histories of the island through methods drawn from its deep spiritual and cultural traditions. Toni Pressley-Sanon employs three theoretical anchors to bring together parts of the African diaspora that are profoundly fractured because of the slave trade. The first is the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, which she uses to identify parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region as Haiti's twinned sites of cultural production. Second, she draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite's idea of tidalectics—the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves—as a way to look at the cultural exchange set in motion by the transatlantic movement of captives. Finally, Pressley-Sanon searches out the places where history and memory intersect in story, expressed by the Kreyòl term istwa. Challenging the tendency to read history linearly, this volume offers a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.

Serving the Spirits
Serving the Spirits

Author: Mambo Vye Zo Komande La Menfo

Publisher:

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780615535241

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A healing and balanced faith, Haitian Vodou is a member of the African Traditional Religions that came into the Western Hemisphere via the Transatlantic slave trade. Despite a much misunderstood image, Vodou gives its practitioners the tools to understand the world around them. By participating in an annual calendar of observances, rituals and services, servitors can engage with the Vodou "Mysteries" , thereby enlisting their aid in helping lead a balanced life. Manbo Vye Zo uses her own story of becoming manbo or mother of the spirits as a stepping stone for her students and godchildren so they can learn by her example. An educational text as well as story, Manbo helps the reader gain a greater understanding of the faith as she leads us ever deeper into unexplored territory. Come experience the world of Haitian Vodou from an insider's perspective, and leave forever changed in your outlook on the world of Vodou.

Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English
Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English

Author: Benjamin Hebblethwaite

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1439906025

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Vodou songs constitute the living memory of Haitian Vodou communities, and song texts are key elements to understanding Haitian culture. Vodou songs form a profound religious and cultural heritage that traverses the past and refreshes the present. Offering a one-of-a-kind research tool on Vodou and its cultural roots in Haiti and pre-Haitian regions, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English provides a substantial selection of hard to find or unpublished sacred Vodou songs in a side-by-side bilingual format. Esteemed scholar Benjamin Hebblethwaite introduces the language, mythology, philosophy, origins, and culture of Vodou through several chapters of source songs plus separate analytical chapters. He guides readers through songs, chants, poems, magical formulae, invocations, prayers, historical texts and interviews, as well as Haitian Creole grammar and original sacred literature. An in-depth dictionary of key Vodou terms and concepts is also provided. This corpus of songs and the research about them provide a crucial understanding of the meaning of Vodou religion, language, and culture.

The Mulatta Concubine
The Mulatta Concubine

Author: Lisa Ze Winters

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2016-01-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0820348961

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Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine, Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure’s centrality to the practices and production of diaspora. Beginning with a meditation on what captive black subjects may have seen and remembered when encountering free women of color living in slave ports, the book traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters mines an archive that includes a 1789 political petition by free men of color, a 1737 letter by a free black mother on behalf of her daughter, antebellum newspaper reports, travelers’ narratives, ethnographies, and Haitian Vodou iconography. Attentive to the tenuousness of freedom, Ze Winters argues that the concubine figure’s manifestation as both historical subject and African diasporic goddess indicates her centrality to understanding how free and enslaved black subjects performed gender, theorized race and freedom, and produced their own diasporic identities.

Haitian Vodou
Haitian Vodou

Author: Mambo Chita Tann

Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide

Published: 2012-02-08

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 0738731633

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Haitian Vodou is a fascinating spiritual tradition rich with ceremonies and magic, songs and prayers, dances and fellowship. Yet outside of Haiti, next to no one understands this joyous and profound way of life. ln Haitian Vodou, Mambo Chita Tann explores the historical roots and contemporary practices of this unique tradition, including discussions of: Customs, beliefs, sacred spaces, and ritual objects Characteristics and behaviors of the Lwa, the spirits served by Vodou practitioners Common misconceptions such as "voodoo dolls" and the zombie phenomenon Questions and answers for attending ceremonies and getting involved in a sosyete (Vodou house) Correspondence tables, Kreyol glossary, supplemental prayer texts, and an extensive list of reference books and online resources Well-researched, comprehensive, and engaging, Haitian Vodou will be a welcome addition for people new to Haitian spirituality as well as for students, practitioners, and academics.

Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution
Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution

Author: Crystal Nicole Eddins

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-10-28

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1108843727

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A new analysis of the origins of the Haitian Revolution, revealing the consciousness, solidarity, and resistance that helped it succeed.

Evangelicals, Catholics, and Vodouyizan in Haiti
Evangelicals, Catholics, and Vodouyizan in Haiti

Author: Celucien L. Joseph

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-04-04

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1350351717

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Exploring the subject through many different theoretical frameworks and epistemological traditions, this book confronts the history of Haiti's three major practicing religious faiths: Vodou, Roman Catholicism, and Protestant Evangelicalism. Scholars, researchers, and faith practitioners have often depicted relations between these traditions as antagonistic, conflicting, unproductive, and lacking in mutual understanding. With the aim of exploring the possibility of nation building in Haiti and the benefits of interreligious collaboration, contributors to this book consider topics such as the obstacles to interfaith dialogue, religious conflict, interreligious dialogue in schools, race and identity, and religious pluralism. This book will be beneficial to scholars, practitioners, historians, and sociologists of religion, as well as the religious communities themselves in Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora.