Vodou en vogue : fashioning Black divinities in Haiti and the United States /

This innovative book centers on fashion and dress among female Vodou practitioners, focusing on fashion's significance within religious ritual, material aesthetics, and embodiment by spirits. With 15 stunning color plates and 12 black-and-white illustrations, the volume effectively links bodily adornment and the formation of religious belief. In conducting her research, Nwokocha (Miami Univ.) spent time accompanying Vodou practitioners to fabric stores in the Boston area. Her central question: What do Vodou spirits (lwa) want? She concludes that, above all, Vodou spirits want to be associated with aesthetically pleasing words, actions, and dress. Nwokocha amply illustrates how the lwa shape the lives of their devotees through the physical presentation of style and adornment, correctly emphasizing that lwa care very much about how their worshipers look. The book focuses on a single manbo, Marie Maude--a Haitian mental health clinician living in the US--who sponsors Vodou ceremonies in both Jacmel, Haiti, and Mattapan, MA. This valuable corrective to past scholarship, which presented Vodou as a religion defined by poverty, shows that participants in Manbo Maude's Mattapan ceremonies are middle class. Vodou en Vogue compares favorably to Karen McCarthy Brown's classic Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (1991), similarly providing an intimate portrait of African-based religion in everyday life. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers and advanced undergraduates through faculty. --Stephen D. Glazier, Yale University