Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States. By Eziaku Atuama

Reviews Copyright © 2024 Association for the Academic Study of New Religions, Inc. 111 of priest or priestess in BAT. It is this kind of "embodied knowledge" that Pérez and others have documented in studies of BAT. Pérez also writes about "kitchenspaces, " where ritual preparation of food for deities and initiates takes place. Here she uses the phrase "spilling one's guts" to depict the sharing of memories, folklore, and personal stories. From these intimate gatherings, traditions are maintained and kinship ties strengthened. Elizabeth Pérez's Element on the gut successfully puts the spotlight on important questions about embodied religion for future scholars. Using the text along with her short video may be useful in a classroom setting if the book is assigned to students in courses in anthropology, religion, and/or sociology of religion. Patricia Barker Lerch, University of North Carolina–Wilmington Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States. By Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha. University of North Carolina Press, 2023. xx + 208 pages. 99. 00 hardcover; 24. 95 softcover; ebook available. Vodou en Vogue is 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 lwa and 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 lwa through 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 lwa exist. For that reason, she does not write in terms of what practitioners believe about them but rather what they are. Readers NR-27-4Text. indd 111 NR-27-4Text. indd 111 5/9/24 3: 33 PM 5/9/24 3: 33 PM Nova Religio 112 Copyright © 2024 Association for the Academic Study of New Religions, Inc. encounter the lwa as 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 Vogue is 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 vogue and seek to apply Judith­ Casselberry's taxonomy (2017) regarding labors of faith to the negotiatory 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. . .