Rara Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora [Paperback]

Rara is a vibrant annual street festival in Haiti, when followers of the Afro-Creole religion called Vodou march loudly into public space to take an active role in politics. Working deftly with highly original ethnographic material, Elizabeth McAlister shows how Rara bands harness the power of Vodou spirits and the recently dead to broadcast coded points of view with historical, gendered, and transnational dimensions.

Elizabeth McAlisteris Professor of Religion and African American studies at Wesleyan University.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes to the Compact Disc: Rara!
Introducing Rara
1. Work and Play, Pleasure and Performance
2 Vulgarity and the Politics of the Small Man
3 Mystical Work: Spirits on Parade
4 Rara and the Jew : Premodern Anti-Judaism in Postmodern Haiti
5 Rara as Popular Army: Hierarchy, Militarism, and Warfare
6 Voices under Domination: Rara and the Politics of Insecurity
7 Rara in New York City: Transnational Popular Culture
Appendix: Chronology of Political Events, 1990-1995, Annotated with Transnational Rara Band Activity
Glossary
Notes
Sources
Index

This is a startling, stunning, and fascinating book about the blend of music, religion, and politics in Haitian culture. McAlister's mastery of many different ways of knowing makes this study an endless source of insight, intrigue, and inspiration.Rara!succeeds magnificently as an exploration into Rara rituals and Haitian music, but it also presents original and generative insights into every aspect of Haiti's past, present, and future. George Lipsitz, author ofDangerous Crossroads

This is a major contribution to the literature on Vodou, Haiti, popular culture, Caribbean culture and music, transnational immigrant practices, and the corpus of black religions in the Americas. It is an extremely well-written, well researched and argued, and highlƒc