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| POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES: MONSTROSITY SPECIAL SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-2005-paper-gothic-capitalism-full.html |
Sunday, January 26, 2020
POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES: MONSTROSITY SPECIAL ISSUE
Gothic "Voodoo" in Africa and Haiti
E Tropic, 2019
This paper seeks to historicize and demystify “Voodoo” religion in Africa and Haiti while also drawing comparisons and contrasts to concepts and themes related to “the gothic”. What is assumed to be “supernatural” or “paranormal” in Western and Gothic circles has long been a part of everyday reality for many peoples of African descent and devotees of Vodun in Western Africa and Vodou in Haiti. Tropes that are essential to realms of the gothic (supernatural characters, mystery, the macabre, spirits, and paranormal entities) — are also central to the cosmology and liturgy of so-called “Voodoo”. As “the gothic” undergoes a resurgence in academic and popular cultures, so too does “Voodoo” religion. And yet, both terms continue to be conflated by popular culture, and by equating “voodoo” with “the gothic”, the true spirt of both concepts become confounded. A certain racialized Eurocentric hegemony devalues one of the world’s least understood religions (“Voodoo”) by equating it with equally distorted concepts of “the gothic”. As globalization transforms society, and the neo-liberal order creates more uncertainty, the continued distortion of both terms continues. Vodun does more than just speak to the unknown, it is an ancient organizing principle and way of life for millions of followers. Vodou/Vodun are not cognates of the “American Zombie gothic”, but rather, are a mode of survival and offer a way of seeing and being in an unpredictable world.
Doi: 10.25120/etropic.18.1.2019.3666
Issue: 1
Volume: 18
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: E Tropic
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 2019
The Gothic is undergoing a pronounced resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears associated with massive social transformations produced by globalisation, the neoliberal order and environmental uncertainty-tropes of the Gothic resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown, the liminal, the unseen;; into hidden histories and feelings. It calls up unspoken truths and secret desires. In the tropics, the gothic manifests in specific ways according to spaces, places, cultures and their encounters. Within the fraught geographies and histories of colonisation and aggression that have been especially acute across the tropical regions of the world, the tropical gothic engages with orientalism and postcolonialism. The tropics, as the region of the greatest biodiversity in the world, is under enormous stress, hence tropical gothic also engages with gothic ecocriticism, senses of space, landscape and place. Globalisation and neoliberalism likewise impact the tropics, and the gothic imagery of these 'vampiric' capitalist forces-which impinge upon the livelihoods, traditions and the very survival of peoples of the tropics-is explored through urban gothic, popular culture, posthumanism and queer theory. As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, a gothic sensibility enables humans to respond to the seemingly dark, nebulous forces that threaten existence. These papers engage with specific instances of Tropical Gothic in West
Doi: 10.25120/etropic.18.1.2019.36
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics
Tropical Gothic, 2019
The rise of supernatural creatures throughout different media in the post-2000 era has resulted in a significant change of audiences' perceptions of vampires, werewolves and witches (among others). Traditionally used to reflect human fears, lack of morals or instinct-related insufficiencies, these creatures are no longer fear-inducing monsters. Instead, their depiction tends to adopt human qualities to confront the audience with missteps and downfalls of contemporary societies and politics. This paper analyzes the television series The Originals as a supernatural mirror image of American society, where the different communities' struggles for power and their place in New Orleans becomes a micro-cosmos for the American nation. The setting plays a crucial role in the series, which Gothicizes New Orleans to construct a space in which the characters are shown to operate in a posthuman context. This paper will clarify how the protagonists' posthuman characteristics and their placement in the subtropical landscape of Louisiana uncovers contemporary societal concerns and brings aspects such as Urban Gothic and tropicality closer to the audiences' reality. Ultimately, it is in the capital of the subtropical Deep South of America where the hegemonic discourse and practices of discrimination and spatial separation are reflected and challenged.
Doi: 10.25120/etropic.18.1.2019.3689
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Tropical Gothic
blood_and_soil_2018
The third season of The Vampire Diaries introduces the story of the “Originals”, a family who came to North America with Vikings in the eleventh century and became vampires as a way to protect themselves against ‘native werewolves’. This mythology draws on the legend of Vinland, a paradise supposedly settled by Vikings in North America and recounted in thirteenth-century saga of the same name. The Vinland story has been used since the nineteenth century to legitimate white nationalism in North America. Further, medievalism more generally permeates both vampire narrative and the mythology of the ‘Old South’ so important to the fictional Mystic Falls where The Vampire Diaries is set. Focusing primarily on season three of The Vampire Diaries, I argue that the series’ emphasis on a Nordic origin for its “Original” vampires, combined with obfuscation of the history and legacy of slavery and racism in the United States, results in a narrative that ultimately, if inadvertently, legitimates white nationalist claims.
Syncretism in Vodu and Orisha
Journal of Religion in Society, 2016
Eric J Montgomery
Journal of Religion in Society, 2016
Eric J Montgomery
This article is a comparative and ethnographic analysis of syncretism as a theoretical tool for explaining " African-based " religions (Vodu and Orisha) in West Africa and the New World. Vodu and Orisha defy syncretism as a valid concept for explaining the creativity of ritual life because it fails to account for the historicity, the religious imagination, or the cultural context of these forms. This article discusses that despite many shortcomings and problems with syncretism as a concept, it continues to be employed across many disciplines, even as it conflates and mystifies the different aspects and elements of African religions. Syncretism approaches tend to mystify African symbols and explain away things that, from the inside, are fundamental to African systems. This article will explain and contextualize many of these flaws and deficiencies with the concept through fieldwork and archival research.
Formation of a Community: How Slaves Found Meaning in Haiti
Forrest Kentwell
This paper was written as kentwell's undergraduate senior thesis during his junior year at Muhlenberg College. Kentwell investigates in a purposefully fractured way how various religions practiced by West African peoples were transformed through groanful pain of the Middle Passage. The paper examines the ways in which the religion of Vodou was created by enslaved people in Haiti and begins to consider how the religion promoted a coherent community.
.“Memory, the Spirit of the Revolution, and Slave Religion: The Representation of the Haitian Revolution in Langston Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti,” Journal of Postcolonial Theory and Theology 4:1 (April 2013): 1-35 Celucien Joseph
Spirits, Slaves, and Memories in the African Diaspora.docx
Shackled Sentiments: Slaves, Spirits, and Memories in the African Diaspora", 2019
Forrest Kentwell
This paper was written as kentwell's undergraduate senior thesis during his junior year at Muhlenberg College. Kentwell investigates in a purposefully fractured way how various religions practiced by West African peoples were transformed through groanful pain of the Middle Passage. The paper examines the ways in which the religion of Vodou was created by enslaved people in Haiti and begins to consider how the religion promoted a coherent community.
.“Memory, the Spirit of the Revolution, and Slave Religion: The Representation of the Haitian Revolution in Langston Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti,” Journal of Postcolonial Theory and Theology 4:1 (April 2013): 1-35 Celucien Joseph
Spirits, Slaves, and Memories in the African Diaspora.docx
Shackled Sentiments: Slaves, Spirits, and Memories in the African Diaspora", 2019
Eric J Montgomery
Book Chapter, from "Shackled Sentiments: Slaves, Spirits, and Memories in the African Diaspora". This chapter looks at "Mama Tchamba" (slave spirit worship) in Ghana, Togo, and Benin among the Ewes and Guin-Mina's with a focus on mimesis, morality, and personhood. With ethnographic stories from spirit-possession rituals and episodes of lineage and slave-ancestor divination
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Shackled Sentiments: Slaves, Spirits, and Memories in the African Diaspora"
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-2005-paper-gothic-capitalism-full.html
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CLR+JAMES
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BLACK+JACOBINS
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HAITI
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=VOODOO
From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 2012
Elizabeth McAlister
Doi: 10.1177/0008429812441310
Issue: 2
Volume: 41
Page Numbers: 187-215
Publication Date: 2012
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 2012
Elizabeth McAlister
Enslaved Africans and Creoles in the French colony of Saint-Domingue are said to have gathered at a nighttime meeting at a place called Bois Caïman in what was both political rally and religious ceremony, weeks before the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The slave ceremony is known in Haitian history as a religio-political event and used frequently as a source of inspiration by nationalists, but in the 1990s, neo-evangelicals rewrote the story of the famous ceremony as a “blood pact with Satan.” This essay traces the social links and biblical logics that gave rise first to the historical record, and then to the neo-evangelical rewriting of this iconic moment. It argues that the confluence of the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution with the political contest around President Aristide’s policies, the growth of the neo-evangelical Spiritual Mapping movement, and of the Internet, produced a new form of mythmaking, in which neo-evangelicals re-signified key symbols of the event—an oath to a divine force, blood sacrifice, a tree, and group unity—from the mythical grammar of Haitian nationalism to that of neo-evangelical Christianity. In the many ironies of this clash between the political afterlife of a slave uprising with the political afterlife of biblical scripture, Haiti becomes a nation held in captivity, and Satan becomes the colonial power who must be overthrown.
Doi: 10.1177/0008429812441310
Issue: 2
Volume: 41
Page Numbers: 187-215
Publication Date: 2012
Vodou and Protestantism, Faith and Survival: The Contest over the Spiritual Meaning of the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti
MANY FOLKS IN THE MEDIA AND ONLINE ARE REMEMBERING THIS DEVASTATING EARTHQUAKE THIS YEAR A DECADE LATER HAITI REMAINSNOT JUST A FAILED STATE BUT A FAILED NATION
Claire Payton
Abstract:
Abstract:
This article explores the spiritual dimension of the Haitian earth-quake of January 12, 2010, and argues that some of the quake’s most profound reverberations occurred at the level of the spirit. Drawing from oral histories with survivors of the disaster, it reveals that Protestantism and the Catholic-Vodou traditions, which are often seen as being diametrically opposed to each other, actually overlap and influence one another. The development of the Haiti Memory Project, an oral history initiative aimed at documenting the impact and implications of the earthquake among Haiti’s popular classes, is also described.Interviews for this project were conducted in Haitian Kreyòl, French, and English.This article features two embedded audio excerpts (one in French, the other in Haitian Kreyòl), as well as a hyperlink to supplementary audio excerpts, that allow readers to experience the multilingual nature of the project. Additionally,hyperlinks allowing online access to three full interviews from the collection appear at the end of the article
© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association.All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
SPEAKING OF PROTESTANTS
SPEAKING OF PROTESTANTS
The Scapegoating of Haitian Vodou Religion: David Brooks’s (2010) Claim that “Voodoo” Is a “Progress-Resistant” Cultural Influence (2014)
Shortly after the catastrophic earthquake that crushed Port-au-Prince and the surrounding towns on January 12, 2010, The New York Times published an article in which columnist David Brooks claimed that “voodoo” is a “progress-resistant” cultural influence because it spreads the message that “life is capricious and planning futile.” Alongside Brooks, many authors promote similar views, especially Christians. I argue that Vodou does not negatively affect progress in Haiti. Rather, there are historical, linguistic, and governmental policies that limit progress. In reality, Vodou practitioners enhance progress in their attention to the planning and giving of ceremonies, in the hierarchical organization they establish in communities, in their ritual and language, and in the education imparted through inheritance, teaching, and initiation. The scapegoating of Vodou by Brooks and others perpetuates a racist colonial legacy, and it betrays an ignorance of the community and the abundant research about it.
"A Salaam Alay: Remnants of West African Islam in Haitian Vodou"
Jon Bullock
Vodou in the Haitian Experience: A Black Atlantic Perspective
Benjamin Hebblethwaite
Michel Weber
More Info: Edited by Celucien L. Joseph and Nixon S. Cleophat
Publisher: Lexington Books
Publication Name: Vodou in the Haitian Experience: A Black Atlantic Perspective
Jon Bullock
It is not uncommon to encounter research in various fields that describes Caribbean music and culture using terms such as "globalization," "modernity," "cosmopolitanism," and "creolization." However, despite the near ubiquity of terms such as these in Caribbean studies, a small group of scholars have begun challenging the meaning and implications of these and similar ideological constructs that tend to reduce centuries’ worth of lived experiences, histories, and encounters to mere points along a single imaginary line. In this paper, I join scholars Stephen Palmié, Jocelyne Guilbault, Aisha Khan, and others in challenging descriptions of Caribbean culture as the unpredictable by-product of contact between black pagan Africans and white Christian Europeans. I examine these concepts in particular relation to scholarship on Haitian vodou that seems to ignore or downplay historical traces of West African Islam in contemporary vodou practices. I attempt to examine the realities of African Muslim slave experience as they apply to the music of Haitian vodou--not as a means of imposing traditional Islamic understandings on vodou practices, but rather as a means of challenging narrow understandings of concepts such as "blackness," "African," "Caribbean," and "Muslim."
Arabian Religion, Islam, and Haitian Vodou: The "Recent African Single-Origin Hypothesis" and the Comparison of World Religions (2016)
Arabian Religion, Islam, and Haitian Vodou: The "Recent African Single-Origin Hypothesis" and the Comparison of World Religions (2016)
Vodou in the Haitian Experience: A Black Atlantic Perspective
Benjamin Hebblethwaite
Michel Weber
This chapter employs a comparative theological and historical approach to Arabian religion, Islam, and Haitian Vodou. This chapter explores possible examples of serial founder effects in the context of world religions. The comparative study of religions may contribute to the exploration of traces of an ancient African culture as manifested in various independent descendent religious traditions. Given the relatively recent migrations out of Africa, we theorize that pre-migratory African religious structures should occur in religions throughout the world. Pre-Islamic Arabian religion, one that has receded since the seventh century of the Common Era but still exists in jinn-cults in north Africa, and its legacies in the Qur'an and Islam (circa 610–632 CE), in addition to African Vodun and Haitian Vodou, serve as lenses through which we build a theory that links related macrocosmic religious structures to the recent African single-origin hypothesis.
More Info: Edited by Celucien L. Joseph and Nixon S. Cleophat
Publisher: Lexington Books
Publication Name: Vodou in the Haitian Experience: A Black Atlantic Perspective
Myth, History, and Repetition: Andre Breton and Vodou
South Central Review, 2015
South Central Review, 2015
Issue: 1
Volume: 32
Publication Date: 2015
Publication Name: South Central Review
IN 1948, ANDRÉ BRETON WROTE AN ESSAY that discussed his first encounter a few years prior with the paintings of Hector Hyppolite at the Centred’ Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.Breton, noting Hyppolite’s role as a Vodou priest, described his strong impression that the artist had, “an important message to communicate, that he was the guardian of a secret.”Breton’swords express a certain contradictory sense about Hyppolite and his painting, in which the urgent, important message is simultaneously a mystery that must be safeguarded or even withheld. As this essay will examine, the same contradiction lies at the heart of Breton’s broader efforts to relate Haiti and its traditions to surrealism’s evolving politics,and it widely relates to ongoing ideological debates within the movement as it evolved in post-World War II Europe. The history and culture of Haiti and Vodou held a central position within Breton’s turn to myth and esotericism in the mid-1940s, and informed his creative projects on secret initiation and utopia as political tools of freedom and the imagination. Yet Breton generally demonstrated a reluctance to write or speak directly about Haiti and Vodou.
SURREALISM, ATLANTIC HISTORY AND ANTI COLONIALISM
Great Impulses and New Paths: VVV, Surrealism, and the Black Atlantic
Revue Miranda, 2017
The 1940s exile in the United States of many European surrealists, including André Breton, is viewed as a moment in which the movement widened to encompass a broader range of artistic voices and visions. This expansion of the surrealist group is reflected in the short-lived but significant journal VVV, which included many contributions from artists of the Americas, and specifically from the Caribbean. It has been suggested that the editors of VVV were also in part inspired by the political efforts of African-Americans, yet the actual connections between the exiled surrealists and the artists, writers, and political activists of Harlem remained limited. This essay examines a moment of missed opportunity due to political repression during the Second World War, and also explores the strong creative alliances formed with writers and artists of Martinique and Cuba, as demonstrated in the pages of VVV.
Volume: 14
Publication Date: 2017
Publication Name: Revue Miranda
“On the True Exercise of Witchcraft” in the Work of Remedios Varo
Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvellous, ed. Tessel Bauduin, Victoria Ferentiou and Daniel Zamani (Routledge, 2018). Studies in Surrealism (Series editor: Gavin Parkinson), , 2018
M. González Madrid
Among the published writings of the artist Remedios Varo there is one letter addressed to a “Dear Mr. Gardner”. Scholars of Varo’s work have long interpreted the letter as an amusement of the author’s, one of her many missives written to people she did not know. However, a recent study has identified this “Mr. Gardner” as Gerald B. Gardner, whose books Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft describe the rituals and beliefs of modern-day witches. In her letter, Varo describes how Miss Carrington “was kind enough” to translate the book for her, and that it had prompted her “great interest”. The identification of this character opens up new readings of Varo’s work.
Varo’s fascination with magic and hermeticism was cultivated together with other artists and writers of the Parisian surrealist group, particularly Benjamin Péret, Óscar Domínguez and Victor Brauner. In both her Parisian work and the work that made her famous in her Mexican exile, one may trace signs of her knowledge about magic, clairvoyance, dreams, automatic “magic dictation”, divination, astrology, alchemy and witchcraft. Moreover, Varo — and other female surrealist artists—were often described as sorceresses , in keeping with the masculine surrealist tradition which, based on Michelet’s La Sorcière, figured the witch as a woman who was wise, rebellious, enigmatic… and beautiful.
Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvellous, ed. Tessel Bauduin, Victoria Ferentiou and Daniel Zamani (Routledge, 2018). Studies in Surrealism (Series editor: Gavin Parkinson), , 2018
M. González Madrid
Among the published writings of the artist Remedios Varo there is one letter addressed to a “Dear Mr. Gardner”. Scholars of Varo’s work have long interpreted the letter as an amusement of the author’s, one of her many missives written to people she did not know. However, a recent study has identified this “Mr. Gardner” as Gerald B. Gardner, whose books Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft describe the rituals and beliefs of modern-day witches. In her letter, Varo describes how Miss Carrington “was kind enough” to translate the book for her, and that it had prompted her “great interest”. The identification of this character opens up new readings of Varo’s work.
Varo’s fascination with magic and hermeticism was cultivated together with other artists and writers of the Parisian surrealist group, particularly Benjamin Péret, Óscar Domínguez and Victor Brauner. In both her Parisian work and the work that made her famous in her Mexican exile, one may trace signs of her knowledge about magic, clairvoyance, dreams, automatic “magic dictation”, divination, astrology, alchemy and witchcraft. Moreover, Varo — and other female surrealist artists—were often described as sorceresses , in keeping with the masculine surrealist tradition which, based on Michelet’s La Sorcière, figured the witch as a woman who was wise, rebellious, enigmatic… and beautiful.
Reconfiguring the Surrealist Gaze: Remedios Varo’s Images of Women
INÉS FERRERO CÁNDENAS
Universidad de Guanajuato, México
Abstract
A large number of surrealist theorizations were devoted to defining the role woman played in the creative process, where she held a polarized position. Within such theorizations the gaze held a key role. It was the gaze of the male poet, painter or photographer, his way of seeing and imagining femininity, which constructed the icon of the surrealist ‘feminine’. This article elucidates upon how Remedios Varo’s paintings revise both the surrealist gaze that sets out a concrete type of female identity and the woman who abandons herself to the (masculinist) cultural conceptualization of what she is. The article presents an analysis of several of Varo’s paintings that reflect upon the construction of ‘femininity’ through an allegorical dimension that makes it possible to understand Varo’s plastic images as a direct response to surrealist theorizations on women’s psyche, existence and images
Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington,and Leonor Fini:
Feminist Lessons in Chimerism, Corporeality, Cuisine, and Craft.
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