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
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