"Ou libéré?" Vodou and Haiti: Speaking the Language of Resistance, Remembrance and Freedom in the Writing of Edwidge Danticat

Citation

Darroch F (2019) "Ou libéré?" Vodou and Haiti: Speaking the Language of Resistance, Remembrance and Freedom in the Writing of Edwidge Danticat. In: Dedenbach-Salazar Saenz S (ed.) Translating Wor(l)ds: Christianity Across Cultural Borders. Collectanea Instituti Anthropos, 51. Baden-Baden: Academia Verlag, pp. 283-304. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783896657954-283

Abstract
This paper analyses how vodou is embedded with in the history of Haiti; it is central to its language, literatures, and narratives of the revolution. Referring to the writer Edwidge Danticat and scholar of religion, Brent Plate, it engages with the ways in which a new language of religiosity, which prioritises the senses, can be creatively transcribed. This language of religiosity is in contrast to a European and Christian use of the term ‘religion’ which has a tendency to segregate the political and the religious, the spiritual and the material, the body and the mind. The language of religiosity used here is instead guided by a female historiography of Haiti and the goddess Erzulie.

Journal
Collectanea Instituti Anthropos

People

Dr Fiona Darroch

Lecturer, Literature and Languages - Division