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

Informationen zum Autor By Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken M.D. Klappentext 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 Trouillot's "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 René Depestre, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and Kettly Mars have revisited the notion of possession since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorships. Zusammenfassung This book recuperates the important history that Haitian thought around Vodou possession has had in French critical theory. Inhaltsverzeichnis Table of ContentsPreface. Haitian Studies, French Critical Theory, and Postcolonial TheoryAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Possession, Dispossession, and Self-Possession: From Pathology to Healing, Braiding Intellectual HistoriesPart I. Dispossessions: Nationhood, Citizenship, Personhood, and PovertyChapter 1. Hegel and Agamben: Materializing Philosophy, Philosophizing the MaterialChapter 2. States of Exceptions: Dayan, Trouillot, and MbembeChapter 3. The Newest Utopia: 'Ending Poverty'Chapter 4. Mbembe's "Unhappiness" and Trouillot's "Fundamentally New Subjects"Part II. Possession Dispossessed: Pathologizing and a 'Western' Intellectual History of PossessionChapter 5. 'Unhappiness' as Taboo: Anthropology, Psychology, and the Disciplining of 'Possession'Chapter 6: Fostering Revolution? Breton's "Haitian Lectures"Chapter 7: Leiris, "Le grand possédé": Ethiopia, Europe, and HaitiChapter 8: From Haiti to Brazil, From Herskovits to Métraux: Anthropology and Human RightsChapter 9: Verger's Image in Bataille's Tears of Eros: Hollier's Dispossessed Intellectuals and Vodou ThoughtChapter 10: Possession, a Threshold to a Biopolitical Order: De Certeau, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Athena AthanasiouPart III. Repossessing Possession: After Franco-American Ethnography, after Duvalier-Vodou in Depestre's Hadriana dans tous mes rêvesChapter 11. Hadriana. The "Autofiction" of the (Anti)Hero of "A New World Mediterranean"Chapter 12. The West's Obsession with Defining Art: Hadriana's Joust with an Aesthetic-Empirical Order of ThingsChapter 13. Between Frankétienne and Glissant: Hadriana's RealpolitikPart IV. Self-Repossession: The Dispossessed and Their "New Subjectivities"-Jean-Claude Fignolé's and Kettly Mars's NovelsChapter 14. On "Un-Becoming" Racial: Jean-Claude Fignolé's Aube TranquilleChapter 15. Repossession as Staying and Dwelling: Kettly Mars's L'Heure Hybride and Aux frontières de la SoifAppe...

Product details

• Authors: Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken
• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 12.11.2014
• EAN: 9780739184653
• ISBN: 978-0-7391-8465-3
• No. of pages: 436
• Subject: Fiction > Poetry, drama