Download or read book Vodou in Haitian Memory written by Celucien L. Joseph and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout Haitian history—from 17th century colonial Saint-Domingue to 21st century postcolonial Haiti—arguably, the Afro-Haitian religion of Vodou has been represented as an “unsettling faith” and a “cultural paradox,” as expressed in various forms and modes of Haitian thought and life including literature, history, law, politics, painting, music, and art. Competing voices and conflicting ideas of Vodou have emerged from each of these cultural symbols and intellectual expressions. The Vodouist discourse has not only pervaded every aspect of the Haitian life and experience, it has defined the Haitian cosmology and worldview. Further, the Vodou faith has had a momentous impact on the evolution of Haitian intellectual, aesthetic, and literary imagination; comparatively, Vodou has shaped Haitian social ethics, sexual and gender identity, and theological discourse such as in the intellectual works and poetic imagination of Jean Price-Mars, Dantes Bellegarde, Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis, etc. Similarly, Vodou has shaped the discourse on the intersections of memory, trauma, history, collective redemption, and Haitian diasporic identity in Haitian women’s writings such as in the fiction of Edwidge Danticat, Myriam Chancy, etc. The chapters in this collection tell a story about the dynamics of the Vodou faith and the rich ways Vodou has molded the Haitian narrative and psyche. The contributors of this book examine this constructed narrative from a multicultural voice that engages critically the discipline of ethnomusicology, drama, performance, art, anthropology, ethnography, economics, literature, intellectual history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, religion, and theology. Vodou is also studied from multiple theoretical approaches including queer, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, postcolonial criticism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis.
Download or read book Vodou in the Haitian Experience written by Nixon S. Cleophat and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Studies the connections and relationships between Vodou and African traditional religions, such as Yoruba religion and Egyptian religion. ... The chapters in this collection tell a story about the dynamics of the Vodou faith and the rich ways Vodou has molded the Haitian narrative and psyche."--Back cover.
Download or read book Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture written by C. Michel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-11-27 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection introduces readers to the history and practice of the Vodou religion, and corrects many misconceptions. The book focuses specifically on the role Vodou plays in Haiti, where it has its strongest following, examining its influence on spiritual beliefs, cultural practices, national identity, popular culture, writing and art.
Download or read book Haitian Vodou written by Mambo Chita Tann and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2012-02-08 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Istwa across the Water written by Toni Pressley-Sanon and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-01-03 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English written by Benjamin Hebblethwaite and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Vodou Shaman written by Ross Heaven and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003-11-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goes beyond the stereotypes to restore Vodou to its proper place as a powerful shamanic tradition • Provides practical exercises and techniques from the Vodou tradition that can be used as safe and effective means of spiritual healing and personal transformation • Shows how to remove evil spirits and negative energies sent by others • Written by a fully initiated Houngan (Vodou shaman) Providing practical exercises drawn from all aspects and stages of the Vodou tradition, Vodou Shaman shows readers how to contact the spirit world and communicate with the loa (the angel-like inhabitants of the Other World), the ghede (the spirits of the ancestors), and djabs (nature spirits for healing purposes). The author examines soul journeying and warrior-path work in the Vodou tradition and looks at the psychological principles that make them effective. The book also includes exercises to protect the spiritual self by empowering the soul, with techniques of soul retrieval, removing evil spirits and negative energies, overcoming curses, and using the powers of herbs and magical baths.
Download or read book Vodou Nation written by Michael Largey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-05 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the Haitian musical tradition is probably best known for the Vodou-inspired roots music that helped topple the two-generation Duvalier dictatorship, the nation’s troubled history of civil unrest and its tangled relationship with the United States is more intensely experienced through its art music, which combines French and German elements of classical music with Haiti's indigenous folk music. Vodou Nation examines art music by Haitian and African American composers who were inspired by Haiti’s history as a nation created by slave revolt. Around the time of the United States’s occupation of Haiti in 1915, African American composers began to incorporate Vodou-inspired musical idioms to showcase black artistry and protest white oppression. Together with Haitian musicians, these composers helped create what Michael Largey calls the “Vodou Nation,” an ideal vision of Haiti that championed its African-based culture as a bulwark against America’s imperialism. Highlighting the contributions of many Haitian and African American composers who wrote music that brought rhythms and melodies of the Vodou ceremony to local and international audiences, Vodou Nation sheds light on a black cosmopolitan musical tradition that was deeply rooted in Haitian culture and politics.
Download or read book Istwa Across the Water written by Toni Pressley-Sanon and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the belief system of Vodou, this project is anchored by three theoretical concepts: tidalectics, a term for the repetitive back-and-forth movement of the ocean, symbolizing ritual, balance, and cyclical unity; Marasa, or twinning, a principle of Vodou in which fragmented parts strive for remembrance and holism; and istwa, a Kreyol term whose meaning encompasses history, story, and memory.
Download or read book Rara written by Elizabeth McAlister and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-05-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rara is a vibrant annual street festival in Haiti, when followers of the Afro-Creole religion called Vodou march loudly into public space to take an active role in politics. Working deftly with highly original ethnographic material, Elizabeth McAlister shows how Rara bands harness the power of Vodou spirits and the recently dead to broadcast coded points of view with historical, gendered, and transnational dimensions.
Download or read book Healing in the Homeland written by Margaret Mitchell Armand and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret Mitchell Armand presents a cutting edge interdisciplinary terrain inside an indigenous exploration of her homeland. Her contribution to the historiography of Haïtian Vodou demonstrates the struggle for its recognition in Haïti’s post-independence phase as well as its continued misunderstanding. Through a methodological, original study of the colonial culture of slavery and its dehumanization, Healing in the Homeland: Haitian Vodou Traditions examines the sociocultural and economic oppression stemming from the local and international derived politics and religious economic oppression. While concentrating the narratives on stories of indigenous elites educated in the western traditions, Armand moves pass the variables of race to locate the historical conjuncture at the root of the persistent Haïtian national division. Supported by scholarships of indigenous studies and current analysis, she elucidates how a false consciousness can be overcome to reclaim cultural identity and pride, and include a sociocultural, national educational program, and political platform that embraces traditional needs in a global context of mutual respect. While shredding the western adages, and within an indigenous model of understanding, this book purposefully brings forth the struggle of the African people in Haïti.
Download or read book Vodou in the Haitian Experience written by Celucien L. Joseph and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One glaring lacuna in studies of Haitian Vodou is the scarcity of works exploring the connection between the religion and its main roots, traditional Yoruba religion. Discussions of Vodou very often seem to present the religion in vacuo, as a sui generis phenomenon that arose in Saint-Domingue and evolved in Haiti, with no antecedents. What is sorely needed then is more comparative studies of Haitian Vodou that would examine its connections to traditional Yoruba religion and thus illuminate certain aspects of its mythology, belief system, practices, and rituals. This book seeks to bridge these gaps. Vodou in the Haitian Experience studies comparatively the connections and relationships between Vodou and African traditional religions such as Yoruba religion and Egyptian religion. Such studies might enhance our understanding of the religion, and the connections between Africa and its Diaspora through shared religious patterns and practices. The general reader should be mindful of the transnational and transcultural perspectives of Vodou, as well as the cultural, socio-economic, and political context which gave birth to different visions and ideas of Vodou. The chapters in this collection tell a story about the dynamics of the Vodou faith and the rich ways Vodou has molded the Haitian narrative and psyche. The contributors of this book examine this constructed narrative from a multicultural voice that engages critically the discipline of ethnomusicology, drama, performance, art, anthropology, ethnography, economics, literature, intellectual history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, religion, and theology. Vodou is also studied from multiple theoretical approaches including queer, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, postcolonial criticism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis.
Download or read book Haitian Vodou written by Monique Joiner Siedlak and published by Oshun Publications, LLC. This book was released on with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haitian Vodou is a vibrant and fascinating indigenous tradition from the island of Haiti. It is an amazing and colorful spiritual tradition comprised of ceremony, music, dances, prayers, magic, and community. Haitian Vodou explores this rich Haitian tradition beginning with a look at Haitian history and how the tradition known as Haitian Vodou evolved. It moves on to cover the basic Principals and Ethics of Haitian Vodou, including a discussion of common confusions and controversies associated with Haitian Vodou as well as a discussion of Haitian Vodou today.
Download or read book Secrets of Voodoo written by Milo Rigaud and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 1985-06 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secrets of Voodoo traces the development of this complex religion (in Haiti and the Americas) from its sources in the brilliant civilizations of ancient Africa. This book presents a straightforward account of the gods or loas and their function, the symbols and signs, rituals, the ceremonial calendar of Voodoo, and the procedures for performing magical rites are given. "Voodoo," derived from words meaning "introspection" and "mystery," is a system of belief about the formation of the world and human destiny with clear correspondences in other world religions. Rigaud makes these connections and discloses the esoteric meaning underlying Voodoo's outward manifestations, which are often misinterpreted. Translated from the French by Robert B. Cross. Drawings and photographs by Odette Mennesson-Rigaud. Milo Rigaud was born in Port au Prince, Haiti, in 1903, where he spent the greater part of his life studying the Voodoo tradition. In Haiti he studied law, and in France ethnology, psychology, and theology. The involvement of Voodoo in the political struggle of Haitian blacks for independence was one of his main concerns.
Download or read book Hadriana in All My Dreams written by René Depestre and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legendary Haitian author Depestre combines magic, fantasy, eroticism, and delirious humor to explore universal questions of race and sexuality. “One-of-a-kind . . . [A] ribald, free-wheeling magical-realist novel, first published in 1988 and newly, engagingly translated by Glover . . . An icon of Haitian literature serves up a hotblooded, rib-ticking, warmhearted mélange of ghost story, cultural inquiry, folk art, and véritable l’amour.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “An exceptional novel . . . Depestre’s masterpiece and one of the greatest examples of Haitian literature.” —New York Journal of Books Hadriana in All My Dreams, winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, takes place primarily during Carnival in 1938 in the Haitian village of Jacmel. A beautiful young French woman, Hadriana, is about to marry a Haitian boy from a prominent family. But on the morning of the wedding, Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion and collapses at the altar. Transformed into a zombie, her wedding becomes her funeral. She is buried by the town, revived by an evil sorcerer, then disappears into popular legend. Set against a backdrop of magic and eroticism, and recounted with delirious humor, the novel raises universal questions about race and sexuality. The reader comes away enchanted by the marvelous reality of Haiti’s Vodou culture and convinced of Depestre’s lusty claim that all beings—even the undead ones—have a right to happiness and true love.
Download or read book The Cry of Verti res written by Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of the Battle of Vertières, fought in 1803 between indigenous Haitian forces under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and a French expeditionary army commanded by Napoleon. The battle marked the culmination of a thirteen-year revolutionary struggle to end slavery and the dawn of an independent Haiti. Yet despite its pivotal importance to the history of Haiti, France, and the Americas, the Battle of Vertières has been struck from the record. The Cry of Vertières is the first book-length study of the battle, drawing from an array of sources including military correspondence, Haitian literature, art, and popular music. The event itself is recounted in vivid detail: it is a dramatic story of a volunteer army of former slaves, seeking the promises of freedom and citizenship held out by the revolution, defeating a colonial power determined to re-enslave them. The book also examines why the history of the battle has been suppressed in France - an act of erasure of a humiliating defeat - and why it remains fragile even in Haiti. Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec explains that today Vertières is both a key lieu de mémoire that embodies reconciliation, pride, and strength for the Haitian people, and a figure of speech exploited by politicians to reinforce their power. Describing a decisive yet largely forgotten moment in the revolutionary history of the Americas, The Cry of Vertières makes an essential contribution to the complex subjects of race, memory, colonialism, and cultural nationalism in present-day France and Haiti.
Download or read book Santeria from Africa to the New World written by George Brandon and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "On his own terms, Brandon more than fulfills his promise to take the reader on the transatlantic journey of the orisha and to explore the complexities of African memory in the diaspora." —American Historical Review "He adeptly addresses broader issues, such as power relations within Caribbean slavery, multiculturalism, and the forms of religious accommodation to cultural change. In addition, he offers a fresh and cogent assessment of the production and reproduction of African beliefs and practices in new contexts. Brandon's exemplary archival research is supplemented by skillful participant observation." —Choice The Yoruba religious tradition arose in West Africa, but its influence has spread beyond Africa to millions of adherents in the Americas as well. Santeria from Africa to the New World retraces one path taken by this tradition—a path from Africa to Cuba and to New York City. George Brandon examines the religion's transatlantic route through Cuban Santeria, Puerto Rican Espiritismo, and Black Nationalism. In following the historical and anthropological evolution of the Yoruba religion, Brandon discusses broader questions of power, multiculturalism, cultural change, and the production and reproduction of African retentions.
