Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States by Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha (review)

Reviewed by: Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United Statesby Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha Jeffrey E. Anderson Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States. By Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha. University of North Carolina Press, 2023. xx + 208pages. 99. 00 hardcover; 24. 95 softcover; ebook available. Vodou en Vogueis the impressive first book of Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha, an assistant professor at the University of Miami. Haitian Vodou has been a popular topic among ethnographers for many decades, with works addressing the faith proliferating in recent years. Nwokocha adds a new wrinkle to the fabric of Vodou scholarship with her examination of what she calls spiritual vogue, defined as "multisensorial ritual practices" in which fashion is used to "unify practitioners and connect with the spirits" (7). Drawing inspiration from Marlon M. Bailey's scholarship of Ballroom culture, the book focuses on the ritual world of the Mattapan, Massachusetts, and Jacmel, Haiti temples of Marie Maude Evans, called "Manbo Maude" by her followers. Nwokocha particularly emphasizes Manbo Maude's innovative clothing and how acts of congregants adorning themselves with such fashions aid believers in their worship, please the lwa, and build bonds among congregants. A second point of emphasis is how queer practitioners interact with fashion, their fellow congregants, and the deities. The subjects covered by Nwokocha include the ways in which Manbo Maude uses elaborate dress to honor the lwaand engage her congregants; the intertwined nature of economics and religion that makes the labor of humans and the deities vital to the function of Vodou; the tensions of race, gender, and sex despite the unity fostered by fashion; and sexual relationships with the lwathrough spiritual marriage and dreams. Nwokocha's work is unusual in a number of ways. For example, though she is not an initiated practitioner herself, she takes for granted that the lwaexist. For that reason, she does not write in terms of what practitioners believe about them but rather what they are. Readers End Page 111encounter the lwaas fellow participants alongside humans in Vodou's ceremonial life, and like the worshippers with whom they interact, they have individual preferences for particular fashions and their own sexual identities. In addition, Vodou en Vogueis unusual among scholarly texts because of the degree to which its author and her experiences are a key primary source. Unlike typical scholarship, which tends to appear as argument based on ostensibly objective data collected by dispassionate scholars, Nwokocha's text blends the traditional scholarship of a participant–observer with elements of memoir. One could be forgiven for assuming that an ethnographical text dedicated in large part to the ways sartorial expression shapes interpersonal and human–divine relationships in Vodou ritual would be weighed down with jargon. With the exception of short portions of the work that define and contextualize terms like spiritual vogueand seek to apply Judith Casselberry's taxonomy (2017) regarding labors of faith to the negotia-tory work required for the successful operation of Manbo Maude's Vodou temples, Nwokocha's work is anything but difficult to follow. While Vodou en Vogue's semiformal approach to its subject sometimes allows readers to lose track of its key themes, its emphasis on the personal stories of informants and the author makes it easy to follow, regardless of one's scholarly background or lack thereof. Moreover, tales like those of Nwokocha shopping for fabric with Manbo Maude, finding herself strapped for cash during her first ethnographic trip to Haiti, and learning in a rather uncomfortable way that her assumptions about Black solidarity were faulty, are some of the most insightful portions of the book. In sum, Vodou en Vogueis not what the average scholar would expect to find in examination of the interactions of material culture and community in an African diasporic religion. Indeed, when I initially read the subtitle, I expected to encounter something akin to a Haitian and American application of the arguments of Suzanne Preston Blier's African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (1996), which examines the ways in which Benin Vodun practitioners physically make their deities. What I found was more reminiscent of Karen. . .