15527: LeGraceBenson:re: Dayan chapter on lwa

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: LeGrace Benson <legrace@twcny.rr.com>

From: LeGrace Benson

Joan Dayan has a chapter, "Querying the Spirit; The Rules of Haitian Lwa,"
in
a just-published book. (pp.31-50, Colonial Saints; Discovering the Holy in
the
Americas, eds. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkof.  New York, London:
Routledge,
2003) In it she asserts that the appropriation of Catholic imagery  was
not
what "...has been seen as subterfuge, a superficial and opportune
observance,
or impressionable and backward mimicry [but] was rather evidence of a
committment and inventiveness that unsettled [European] racist
assumptions."
I found her chapter thought-provoking, hence recommend it to those on this
list
who have an interest in Vodou.

Dayan is professor of English at U. Penn. and a visiting fellow in
Princeton
University's Program in Law and Public Affairs.
The connections she make in this chapter between colonial law, later
Haitian
law and the lwas bears close reading, in my opinion.