Asen, Ancestors, and Vodun

Asen, Ancestors, and Vodun PDF Author: Edna G. Bay
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252032551
Category : Altars, Fon
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description
A social and iconographic history of a West African sculptural form

Asen, Ancestors, and Vodun

Asen, Ancestors, and Vodun PDF Author: Edna G. Bay
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252032551
Category : Altars, Fon
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description
A social and iconographic history of a West African sculptural form

African Science

African Science PDF Author: Douglas J. Falen
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299318907
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this sensitive and personal investigation into Benin's occult world, Douglas J. Falen wrestles with the challenges of encountering a reality in which magic, science, and the Vodun religion converge into a single universal force. He takes seriously his Beninese interlocutors' insistence that the indigenous phenomenon known as àze ("witchcraft") is an African science, credited with fantastic and productive deeds, such as teleportation and supernatural healing. Although the Beninese understanding of àze reflects positive scientific properties in its use of specialized knowledge to harness nature's energy and realize economic success, its boundless power is inherently ambivalent because it can corrupt its users, who dispense death and destruction. Witches and healers are equivalent to supervillains and superheroes, locked in epic battles over malevolent and benevolent human desires. Beninese people's discourse about such mystical confrontations expresses a philosophy of moral duality and cosmic balance. Falen demonstrates how a deep engagement with another lived reality opens our minds and contributes to understanding across cultural difference.

Mark of Voodoo

Mark of Voodoo PDF Author: Sharon Caulder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780738701837
Category : Vodou
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Caulder writes of the links between her heritage, her spirituality and the practices of Voodoo and Shamanism. color photos.

The Faces of the Gods

The Faces of the Gods PDF Author: Leslie G. Desmangles
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807861014
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

African Vodun

African Vodun PDF Author: Suzanne Preston Blier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226058603
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 500

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This book will be of critical importance not only to those concerned with African, African American, and Caribbean art, but also to anthropologists, scholars of the African diaspora, students of comparative religion and comparative psychology, and anyone fascinated by the traditions of vodou and vodun."--Jacket.

Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics

Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics PDF Author: Kameelah L. Martin
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498523293
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the twenty-first century, American popular culture increasingly makes visible the performance of African spirituality by black women. Disney’s Princess and the Frog and Pirates of the Caribbean franchise are two notable examples. The reliance on the black priestess of African-derived religion as an archetype, however, has a much longer history steeped in the colonial othering of Haitian Vodou and American imperialist fantasies about so-called ‘black magic’. Within this cinematic study, Martin unravels how religious autonomy impacts the identity, function, and perception of Africana women in the American popular imagination. Martin interrogates seventy-five years of American film representations of black women engaged in conjure, hoodoo, obeah, or Voodoo to discern what happens when race, gender, and African spirituality collide. She develops the framework of Voodoo aesthetics, or the inscription of African cosmologies on the black female body, as the theoretical lens through which to scrutinize black female religious performance in film. Martin places the genre of film in conversation with black feminist/womanist criticism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to film analysis. Positioning the black priestess as another iteration of Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images, Martin theorizes whether film functions as a safe space for a racial and gendered embodiment in the performance of African diasporic religion. Approaching the close reading of eight signature films from a black female spectatorship, Martin works chronologically to express the trajectory of the black priestess as cinematic motif over the last century of filmmaking. Conceptually, Martin recalibrates the scholarship on black women and representation by distinctly centering black women as ritual specialists and Black Atlantic spirituality on the silver screen.

A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou

A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou PDF Author: Benjamin Hebblethwaite
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 149683562X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Formation of Candomble

The Formation of Candomble PDF Author: Luis Nicolau Parés
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469610922
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book Here

Book Description
Formation of Candomble: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil"

Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World

Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World PDF Author: James Hoke Sweet
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834491
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
Between 1730 and 1750, Domingos Alvares traversed the colonial Atlantic world like few Africans of his time--from Africa to South America to Europe. By tracing the steps of this powerful African healer and vodun priest, James Sweet finds dramatic means fo

African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade: Volume 1, The Sources

African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade: Volume 1, The Sources PDF Author: Alice Bellagamba
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110732808X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 587

Get Book Here

Book Description
Though the history of slavery is a central topic for African, Atlantic world and world history, most of the sources presenting research in this area are European in origin. To cast light on African perspectives, and on the point of view of enslaved men and women, this group of top Africanist scholars has examined both conventional historical sources (such as European travel accounts, colonial documents, court cases, and missionary records) and less-explored sources of information (such as folklore, oral traditions, songs and proverbs, life histories collected by missionaries and colonial officials, correspondence in Arabic, and consular and admiralty interviews with runaway slaves). Each source has a short introduction highlighting its significance and orienting the reader. This first of two volumes provides students and scholars with a trove of African sources for studying African slavery and the slave trade.