Whosoever Doubts My Power: Conjuring Feminism in the Interwar Black Diaspora

摘要

This dissertation uses the revolutionary potential of Caribbean religion to theorize black feminism between the two World Wars. It argues that women artists and performers across the diaspora produced ethnographic and creative representations of Haitian Vodou (and its sister religions) in order to formulate a radical and pan-African feminism. Unlike accounts of the savagery and hedonism of a sensationalized "voodoo" perpetuated by white male travelers to Haiti, black women's narratives of Vodou focused specifically on its status as a theology of resistance. By re-animating apolitical narratives of "voodoo" with their original spiritual provenance in Vodou, women of color laid claim to the political force of the religion behind the largest successful slave revolt in the Western hemisphere. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).