Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History

Voorkant
Lexington Books, 12 nov 2014 - 444 pagina's
This book recuperates the important history that Haitian thought around Vodou possession has had in French critical theory. The author takes the period of the 1930s and ‘40s, as the centerfold of a more complex network of relations that places Haiti as one of the pivots of a more expanded intellectual conversation around “possession,” which links anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, human rights, and visual arts in France, Haiti, and the United States. Benedicty argues that Haiti as the anthropological other serves as a kick-starter to an entire French-based theoretical apparatus (Breton, Leiris, Bataille, de Certeau, Foucault, and Butler), but once up and running, its role as catalyst is forgotten and the multiple iterations of the anthropological other are cast back into the net of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “Savage slot.”

The book offers the reader unfamiliar with Haiti a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of twentieth and early twenty-first century Haitian thought, including a detailed timeline of important moments in the intellectual history that connects Haiti to France and the United States.

The first part of the book is about global dispossessions in the first decades of the twentieth century; the second part points to how the narratives of ‘Haiti’ are intimately linked to a Franco-U.S.-American discursive space, constructed over the course of the twentieth century, a discursive order that has conflated the representation of ‘Haiti’ with an understanding of Vodou primarily as an occult religion, and not as a philosophical system. The third and fourth parts of the book examine how the novels of René Depestre, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and Kettly Mars have revisited the notion of possession since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorships.
 

Inhoudsopgave

Preface
1
Acknowledgments
11
Possession Dispossession and SelfPossession
15
Dispossessions Nationhood Citizenship Personhood and Poverty
43
Possession Dispossessed Pathologizing and a Western Intellectual History of Possession
101
Repossessing Possession After FrancoAmerican Ethnography after DuvalierVodou in Depestres Hadriana dans tous mes rêves
201
SelfRepossession The Dispossessed and Their New SubjectivitiesJeanClaude Fignolés and Kettly Marss Novels
271
Appendix
361
Bibliography
383
Index
399
About the Author
419
Copyright

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Over de auteur (2014)

Alessandra Benedicty is assistant professor of Caribbean and postcolonial literatures in French at the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the City College of New York.

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