Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism (review)

The material Michael Largey explores in Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism is far richer than the book's title might suggest. Interspersing rigorous analyses of historical and musical texts with personal accounts drawn from his fieldwork in Haiti, Largey raises questions that center on the dynamic role of Vodou in promoting politicized visions of Haiti in the Caribbean and the United States. What was the role of Haitian art music in constructing collective identities within the Haitian transnational nation-state? In what ways did these identity constructions serve the purposes of various social and intellectual "elites," who, for various political reasons, strived to depict Haiti as a "Vodou Nation"?

Largey's multi-layered ethnomusicological approach resonates strongly with recent ethnographies of Haitian musical and religious practice. Following Elizabeth McAlister's Rara!: Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora (University of California Press 2002), and Karen Richman's Migration and Vodou (University Press of Florida 2005), Vodou Nation provides much-needed insight into the role of religion and musical practice in negotiating Haitian transnational identities. However, the book distinguishes itself from previous ethnomusicological works about Haiti by exploring Haitian art music (mizik savant ayisyen) and underscoring the historical connections between Haitian and African American composers, political activists, and cultural commentators. African American figures such as W. E. B. DuBois, William Grant Still, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neal Hurston saw Haiti as an inspiration for artistic creations and political stances that made reference to Haiti's history as the first black-led independent nation in the hemisphere. Many African Americans even viewed Haiti as an alternate "homeland" in the first half of the nineteenth century (36), and Jean Price-Mars's push for Haitian educational reform borrowed, in turn, from Booker T. Washington's ideas about technical education (47).

Covering the 1890s to the 1950s, Vodou Nation is structured around Largey's discussion of four modes of cultural memory, which he labels recombinant mythology, vulgarization and classicization, diasporic cosmopolitanism, and music ideology. Through these modes of remembering, Haitian elites brought an idealized past into the present as a way of portraying Haiti as a unique, yet universally relevant, nation-state. The "Vodou nation" is thus understood as "a project of cultural nationalism which manufactures national sentiment through emotional attachments to an imagined past" (19). This description is reinforced by some of Largey's very interesting references to nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy performances in the United States, the "transgressive glee" (83) of which Largey compares to Haitian elites' appropriations of peasant culture.

Recombinant mythology is the process through which Haitians "use mythologically oriented language to highlight praiseworthy characteristics of cultural heroes" (62). In historical narratives about cultural heroes, past presidents such as Dessalines are often infused with spiritual attributes borrowed from Vodou spirits. This narrative combining of attributes is, however, already a feature of Haitian popular religion. As Largey points out, the various lwa (Vodou spirits) were themselves already recombined through the process of being recontextualized in New World African societies and the sharing of attributes among various spirits (75). Largey's discussion of recombinant mythology delves into the careers of two important figures: Haitian composer Occide Jeanty and poet Oswald Durand. Both of these artists responded to foreign intervention by creating works that expressed patriotic sentiments. By evoking the sights and sounds of the Vodou ceremony, they also used of their art as "contact points" between elites and peasants. This enabled members of the elite class "to connect themselves selectively to aspects of lower-class Haitian culture without risk of social contamination" (84). Elite writers, in turn, used Vodou imagery to help weave a historical narrative of Jeanty and Durand as cultural heroes. Such narratives tended to conflate Jeanty's creative process with a "musical possession trance" in order to suggest a mystical source for the composer's musical genius (85). One of the remarkable aspects of Largey's book is that he provides some of the...