Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History

(Hardback)

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This book recuperates the important history that Haitian thought around Vodou possession has had in French critical theory. The author takes the period of the 1930s and 40s, as the centerfold of a more complex network of relations that places Haiti as one of the pivots of a more expanded intellectual conversation around possession, which links anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, human rights, and visual arts in France, Haiti, and the United States. Benedicty argues that Haiti as the anthropological other serves as a kick-starter to an entire French-based theoretical apparatus (Breton, Leiris, Bataille, de Certeau, Foucault, and Butler), but once up and running, its role as catalyst is forgotten and the multiple iterations of the anthropological other are cast back into the net of Michel-Rolph Trouillots Savage slot. The book offers the reader unfamiliar with Haiti a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of twentieth and early twenty-first century Haitian thought, including a detailed timeline of important moments in the intellectual history that connects Haiti to France and the United States. The first part of the book is about global dispossessions in the first decades of the twentieth century; the second part points to how the narratives of Haiti are intimately linked to a Franco-U.S.-American discursive space, constructed over the course of the twentieth century, a discursive order that has conflated the representation of Haiti with an understanding of Vodou primarily as an occult religion, and not as a philosophical system. The third and fourth parts of the book examine how the novels of Ren Depestre, Jean-Claude Fignol, and Kettly Mars have revisited the notion of possession since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorships.

Reviews

[There are] many fascinating moments in Alessandra Benedicty-Kokkens rich book on the question of possession as artistic metaphor, intellectual crossroads, and religious practice. It is constructed perhaps most like a work of literature, its plot sinuous, with meanings accumulated powerfully over the course of a reading. There is a counterpoint between longer chapters, which include detailed close readings of certain texts, and shorter ones with flashes of insight that help to situate and reconfigure what has come before and after. There is a lot to hold together here: varied forms of discursive intervention, a constant return to the question of possession as practice itself within Vodou, different geographical sites and historical moments and basic ways of apprehending and acting within the world. But the book does it marvelously owing both to Benedicty-Kokkens engaging voice and the solid conceptual direction that undergirds the entire work. In a sense her interpretation of Depestre is the crossroads of the book, the insights here made possible precisely because of the rich cartography she offers throughout the rest of the work. Here and throughout the work, she allows us to see and understand an entangled intellectual and aesthetic configuration, one in which Haiti has been and is at the centre, in a new and transformative way. * French Studies *
Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History is an ambitious and groundbreaking work. An interdisciplinary, provocative, and engaging study of spirit possession, Benedicty-Kokkens book provides a rigorous and important analysis of the heretofore underappreciated role of Haitian Vodou in international thought as well as a strong argument for the potential healing possibilities of possession as a practice that should not be pathologized, but held up as a model of dealing with an ever-upsetting and disenfranchised global order. The intellectual history established here encourages, and no doubt will inspire, further study of possession, especially by Haitian ethnographers and/ or practitioners in Haiti. The breadth and depth of this study make it an essential read for not only Haitian studies and postcolonial scholars, but also for those whose work engages in ethnography, anthropology, philosophy, psychiatry, religious studies, and French studies more generally. * Contemporary French Civilization *
All in all, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken has produced a most rigorous theoretical text that deeply probes the notions of possession in Atlantic intellectual history. Relying on Western ethnographic accounts of spirit possession and Haitian literary tropes of self-possession, she draws attention to Africans historical dispossession of rights to land and citizenship (in tandem with the disavowal of their humanity). In doing so, the author proves her salt as a multidisciplinary scholar capable of integrating several fields of inquiry into Haitian cultural thought. Furthermore, the appendix alone serves as a major contribution to Atlantic intellectual histories of the twentieth century. Most poignantly, the introduction and conclusion offer bookends with invocations of two prominent Haitian scholars. Indeed, keeping in line with the Latin root of possessionpossidere, with potis meaning able, capable and sedere meaning to sit, to inhabit Alessandra Benedicty-Kokkens book is one to sit with and inhabit. * Journal of Haitian Studies *
The book opens promising paths in that sense and we must salute the audacity of the authors multicentered reflections as well as her erudition. It also encourages a much-needed interrogation of our methods, assumptions, origins, and cultural influences. * New West Indian Guide *
A tour-de-force of interdisciplinary rigor, this book redefines the meaning of postcolonial scholarship, brilliantly crossing historical and archival work with the demands of theoretical speculation. As she takes on the legacy of injustice and evasion at the heart of modernity, Benedicty challenges us to approach the experience of possession in vodou as nothing less than a re-imagining of the ethical life. -- Colin Dayan, Author of Haiti, History, and the Gods
In this wide-ranging, ambitious, and provocative study, Alessandra Benedicty makes a significant and highly original contribution to new scholarship on Haiti. Entering into dialogue with essential thinkers and engaging with key literary texts, she considers spirit possession within a wider frame of politics, culture, and power. The phenomenon is understood not in terms of pathology and exoticism, but analyzed instead as an active embodiment of thought and as a form of self-narration in a context of persistent disenfranchisement. Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History is an important book. It deserves to be widely read. -- Charles Forsdick, University of Liverpool
In a head-on challenge to disciplinary conventionalism and gate-keeping, Benedictys account of spirit possession in French and Haitian culture is full of unexpected insights and riveting connections that bring into the same frame colonial histories, ethnographic reports, contemporary critical theory, and postcolonial French and Haitian literatures. A provocative and immensely promising way of constructing intellectual history. -- Sibylle Fischer, New York University
Michel Leiris once wrote, "I prefer to be possessed than to study the possessed." Alessandra Benedicty's wide-ranging and erudite studytakes the opposite view.A passionatecase for rethinking spirit possession as therapy, as a way of processing dispossession in Haiti. -- J. Michael Dash, New York University

Author Bio

Alessandra Benedicty is assistant professor of Caribbean and postcolonial literatures in French at the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the City College of New York.