Receiving Vodou Macbeth

Each of these responses provides useful starting and focal points for the reception of my argument on Vodou Macbeth. Each is extremely helpful, too, for my own work, as I continue to think through its stakes and claims, and I am very grateful for the guiding engagements of Marguerite Rippy, Peter Erickson, and Ayanna Thompson. They raise important issues and questions that in themselves deserve entire essays adequately to address with respect to my own position on Shakespeare, race, and authenticity, in Vodou Macbeth and more broadly. In my brief response here, I will offer clarifications, elaborations, rebuttals, and more queries.

Thompson asks important and delicate questions about the critical place of authenticity and reception in performance studies. She understandably finds my assertion of the Vodou influence in Vodou Macbeth “more wishful and fantastical than real and proven” (685), given its virtual absence in surviving records of the production’s reception. While I embrace her utopian ascription to my essay, I would encourage us to remember that the centuries-long oppression against Vodou has had very real effects. Not surprisingly, in 1920s Harlem, the “the majority” of practitioners of West Indian religions “[did] not advertise” (McKay 75). They practiced in secret and became known only by word of mouth. Largely for that reason, Harlem Vodou of the interwar period remains a challenging and understudied field of research. So I think it fair to assert that those who would have been most inspired by Vodou Macbeth’s historical and religious rendering may not have wanted to publish or speak publicly about it, or it may not have been feasible for them to do so. If most U.S. blacks living in acute racial oppression through the 1930s faced enormous challenges in publicizing their thoughts and experiences, then immigrant communities in Harlem in 1936, as black and foreign, while by no means totally silenced, faced even greater difficulties in promulgating their views.¹

In light of our case, it should be said that reception studies, in order to recover marginalized receptions not on record, must be on some level approximate, and must in the final analysis substitute likely conclusions for definite or absolute ones. We must attend to influences beyond the concrete and to the successes hidden within the apparent failures. This lends our project a utopian aspect, to be sure, but the occult utopias of influence and inspiration we seek are not simply imaginary reconstructions of a more complex, bleaker history. They are credible if arguable claims—and what compelling claims are not arguable?—for countercurrents of transitory but meaningful impressions, subtle eddies and undercurrents perceptible only by connecting their shadows and traces into constellations whose shapes suggest power, and whose suggestions are powerful.

I am in avid agreement with Rippy that the individual histories of still neglected cast and crew members of Vodou Macbeth are important, exciting, and potentially transformative avenues for future research, demanding still deeper and subtler focus in studies of the production. I would caution, however, apropos her erudite and productive disagreements with me, that the Nigerian and Sierra Leonean nationalities of Abdul Essen and Asadata Dafora were not necessarily limiting factors in their Vodou performance. Rather, they were and are enabling. Afro-Haitian Vodou, though as conceptually complex, historically rich, ritually elaborate, and socially effective as any other religion, is not as neat or exclusive per se as most Western belief systems and their sharply defined denominations. It is rooted in and shares much in common with West African Vodun, which is still widely practiced in Nigeria and, though partially routed in Sierra Leone by the Christianization and Islamization of the country, nevertheless constitutes an indispensable vein of Sierra Leonean religious history and contemporary practice. Likewise, Abdul Essen’s Muslim identity did not detract from his Vodou performance.² It was actually quite fitting in a production set amidst the Haitian Revolution, as Dutty Boukman, the storied leader of the inaugural Haitian Vodou ceremony that formally commenced the revolution—whose head was stuck on a pike early in the fight for freedom and whose legendary martyrdom was clearly evoked by Macbeth’s lurid death in the 1936 Vodou...