Eziakku Nwokocha
Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the U.S
In this innovative ethnographic study, Eziaku Nwokocha explores two Vodou temples located in Mattapan, Massachusetts and Jacmel, Haiti, each run by a Haitian practitioner and former fashion designer named Manbo Maude. Nwokocha investigates Manbo Maude’s temples as sites of innovation that reflect the dynamic relationship between religious ritual, material aesthetics, and spiritual embodiment within African Diasporic religions. The production of ritual garments within these primary research locations spotlights how adornment practices are key to serving the gods, illuminating a larger economy of fashion and spiritual exchange. Through insights gained from over a decade of participant observation in Vodou ceremonies in Montreal, New York, Miami, Boston and Haiti, Nwokocha illustrates how fashion in the religious and social life of Vodou contributes to transnational communal identity formation in the African Diaspora. This inaugural book on fashion and Haitian Vodou weaves together the performativity of gender, race, the multisensorial experience of religion, and religious and material exchanges between Africa and the African Diaspora, all while contemplating what the gods want and demand from worshippers. Nwokocha shows that in Vodou, the spirits have the capacity to impact Black people’s everyday lives, removing any divides between the sacred and the secular and manifesting in vivid, creative displays of ceremonial fashion.Forthcoming, release date TBA
Image Credit: Steven King
Jack Delehanty
Making Moral Citizens: Faith-Based Organizing for Racial Justice and Economic Fairness
Making Moral Citizens takes readers inside faith-based community organizing, one of the largest and most effective social justice movements in the U.S., to show how organizers use religion to build power for change. Based on intensive ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, this book explains that more than beliefs and doctrines, religion provides the fuel for a process of personal reflection and relationship-building that transforms people’s understandings of themselves, those around them, their communities, and the political system. Through relational practices like one-to-one conversations and public storytelling, organizers help people see how much they have in common across race, class, and religious lines, and how the inequalities and indignities of contemporary American life impede their goals and aspirations. By making these shared goals the foundation of a personal calling to advance dignity, equity, and prosperity for all, these faith-based leaders make everyday people into moral citizens: empowered social actors who see public action as the only way to live out their faith values. And by appealing to faith as a source of personal moral motivation rather than rules and guidelines, they exemplify an organizing model that leaders in secular settings might well be able to mimic.
Forthcoming, release date TBA.
Michael Amoruso
Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in Urban Brazil
São Paulo is a city of ghosts. And on Mondays, “the day of the souls,” people visit cemeteries and Catholic churches across town to light candles for the suffering dead. They do it, they say, because “souls need light.” But they also pray because the dead are powerful in their ability to help the living. In this book, Michael Amoruso offers a detailed portrait of the devotion to souls (devoção às almas) in contemporary São Paulo. Recognizing that the most popular sites for the practice are also sites of spectral presence, he asks what haunts the city. Through archival research, multi-sited ethnography, and interviews with over one hundred devotees and activists, Amoruso argues that suffering underpins a relationship of mutual aid between the living and the dead, drawing them together at sites of social violence. Their practice, in turn, illumines the ways in which São Paulo’s built landscape is haunted by modernity—namely, the interwoven processes of “whitening” the population through European immigration, industrialization, and ambitious projects of sanitation and urban development. It also suggests that care for the suffering dead provokes political movement, as devotees and activists press for official recognition of social violence, especially as related to slavery and its afterlives.
Forthcoming, release date TBA.