Books by Elizabeth A . McAlister
Rara is a vibrant annual street festival in Haiti, when followers of the Afro-Creole religion cal... more Rara is a vibrant annual street festival in Haiti, when followers of the Afro-Creole religion called Vodou march loudly into public space to take an active role in politics. Working deftly with highly original ethnographic material, Elizabeth McAlister shows how Rara bands harness the power of Vodou spirits and the recently dead to broadcast coded points of view with historical, gendered, and transnational dimensions.
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Race, Nation and Religion in the Americas, 2004
The pioneering essays collected in this volume bring critical new perspectives to the interdiscip... more The pioneering essays collected in this volume bring critical new perspectives to the interdisciplinary study of racial, national, and religious identities. The authors demonstrate that one cannot study these categories of identity formation in isolation, but must instead examine the ways each intersects with-and ultimately helps construct-the others. This innovative theoretical perspective sheds new light on the role of religion in shaping the lives of diverse communities throughout the Americas and forces us to reevaluate the reductive opposition between secular and religious identities. The twelve essays in the volume explore the ties between race, nation, and religion in ethnographic and historical detail. Topics range from Jesuit mission work to Hollywood film, manifest destiny to liberation theology, the Haitian Rara festival to American immigration law. In these and other contexts, the authors explore the intertwined histories of a hemisphere defined at the charged intersections of race, nation, and religion.
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Articles & Chapters by Elizabeth A . McAlister
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2005
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Women in French, 2019
This essay analyzes Caribbean Creolophone womenʼs speech, para-linguistic sounds, and songs as an... more This essay analyzes Caribbean Creolophone womenʼs speech, para-linguistic sounds, and songs as an underappreciated form of womenʼs self-fashioning. Afro-Creole womenʼs speech developed as a tradition within conditions of fugitivity (Derby 2014; Moten 2008). Fugitive speech here refers to speech and vocalized sounds, meant to be understood only by those in a position to know its meanings, under repressive conditions. Caribbean women use vocal expressions to constitute themselves into collectivities that sustain and support them. This essay firstconsiders the sphere of womenʼs gossip and its metalinguistic sounds, and then the links between gossip and magic that reveal themselves in the ethos of fugitivity and silence in the magico-juridical secret societies in Haiti. Finally, we listen to the noisy, boisterous womenʼs songs in the public street bands called Raras. A final section considers the silences, sufferings, and punishments that men have visited on Creolophone women and the links between silence, para-linguistic sounds, and suffering. This essay builds on Sarah Mantilla Griffinʼs work on Black womenʼs "sonic performatives" in American literature. Griffith argues that black womenʼs writings incorporate soundbased ways of knowing that have contributed to Afro-modernity, but have gone underappreciated (Griffin 2012, vi). I extend her insights to consider the Creolophone sounds, noises, and speech that Haitian women have created to sustain and express themselves and defy male repression.
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Spirit Service: Vodun and Vodou in the African Atlantic World, 2022
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Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 2012
Enslaved Africans and Creoles in the French colony of Saint-Domingue are said to have gathered at... more Enslaved Africans and Creoles in the French colony of Saint-Domingue are said to have gathered at a nighttime meeting at a place called Bois Caïman in what was both political rally and religious ceremony, weeks before the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The slave ceremony is known in Haitian history as a religio-political event and used frequently as a source of inspiration by nationalists, but in the 1990s, neo-evangelicals rewrote the story of the famous ceremony as a “blood pact with Satan.” This essay traces the social links and biblical logics that gave rise first to the historical record, and then to the neo-evangelical rewriting of this iconic moment. It argues that the confluence of the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution with the political contest around President Aristide’s policies, the growth of the neo-evangelical Spiritual Mapping movement, and of the Internet, produced a new form of mythmaking, in which neo-evangelicals re-signified key symbols of the event—an oath to a divine force, blood sacrifice, a tree, and group unity—from the mythical grammar of Haitian nationalism to that of neo-evangelical Christianity. In the many ironies of this clash between the political afterlife of a slave uprising with the political afterlife of biblical scripture, Haiti becomes a nation held in captivity, and Satan becomes the colonial power who must be overthrown.
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Gatherings in Diaspora, Jan 1, 1998
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Journal of Africana Religions, 2014
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Ghetto Biannale/Geto Byanal 2009-2015 , 2017
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Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives, 2009
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Sacred Waters: A Cross-Cultural Compendium of Hallowed Springs and Holy Wells, 2020
This essay explores a pilgrimage in the Haitian mountains to a waterfall called Sodo. Various wat... more This essay explores a pilgrimage in the Haitian mountains to a waterfall called Sodo. Various water spirits in Afro-Haitian cosmology dwell in the waterfall, charging the site with the energy of transformation. Springs, rivers, and waterfalls are often “owned” by a spirit, whose energies can be “worked” by humans for healing treatments. These spirits appear through the chemin dlo—the water path. Water is part of the life source, and the water path is a vehicle for water-borne energies. Water is one of the four elements that Vodou initiates are taught to respect as natural spiritual forces; it covered the earth at the beginning of time, and it separates the living from the world of the ancestors. Pilgrims arrive to Sodo’s nearby village in time for the July 16th feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, who is thought to “walk with” a deity called Ezili, also associated with water. Many in Haiti share an ontological stance that Catholic Saints and Afro-Creole spirits overlap, and so the spiritual works of Vodouist Catholics are achieved in a process of religious code-switching through language, color, and leaving offerings of spiritual significance.
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Rara!
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Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Black Atlantic Religions , 2014
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Caribbean popular culture: power, politics and performance, 2016
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Spirit on the Move: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora, 2019
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Haiti is an officially Roman Catholic country, and the popular religion
of Vodou incorporates man... more Haiti is an officially Roman Catholic country, and the popular religion
of Vodou incorporates many Catholic elements. Why, then, is Jesus
Christ relatively deemphasized in both traditions, while Mary and
the countless saints and spirits have a greater presence in the religious
lives of most Haitians? This article delves into the Roman Catholic
and Kongolese Catholic history of Haiti to explore why Jesus Christ
is a relatively remote figure and why he is represented as white in a
Black-majority country.
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Journal of Religious and Political Practice, 2016
This article examines how militarism has come to be one of the generative forces of the prayer pr... more This article examines how militarism has come to be one of the generative forces of the prayer practices of millions of Christians across the globe. To understand this process, I focus on the articulation between militarization and aggressive forms of prayer, especially the evangelical warfare prayer developed by North Americans since the 1980s. Against the backdrop of the rise in military spending and neoliberal economic policies, spiritual warfare evangelicals have taken on the project of defending the United States on the “spiritual” plane. They have elaborated a complex theology and prayer practice with a highly militarized discourse and set of rituals for doing “spiritual battle” and conducting “prayer strikes” on the “prayer battlefield”. The work draws on ethnographic fieldwork at an intensive spiritual warfare boot camp organized by a group of Native Americans who have founded a training base in Oklahoma dedicated to training recruits in the theology and practical strategy of spiritual warfare. Despite their hyper-aggressive rhetorical and ideological stance, members of this network in fact practice self-sacrificial rituals of fasting, holiness, and submission to the Holy Spirit. Native prayer warriors are using spiritual warfare prayer to assert a privileged place for themselves in Christian life as heirs of God’s authority over the stewardship of North American land and as central to the project of repairing sinful pasts both on and off the reservations, reconciling present racial conflict, and defending the land in spiritual battle against new immigrant invasions by foreign, demonic forces.
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Nova Religio, 2013
This article addresses religious responses to disaster by examining how one network of conservati... more This article addresses religious responses to disaster by examining how one network of conservative evangelical Christians reacted to the Haiti earthquake and the humanitarian relief that followed. The charismatic Christian New Apostolic Reformation (or Spiritual Mapping movement) is a transnational network that created the conditions for post-earthquake, internally displaced Haitians to arrive at two positions that might seem contradictory. On one hand, Pentecostal Haitian refugees used the movement’s conservative, right-wing theology to develop a punitive theodicy of the quake as God’s punishment of a sinful nation. On the other hand, rather than resign themselves to victimhood and passivity, their strict moralism allowed these evangelical refugees to formulate an uncompromising critique of the Haitian government, the United Nations peacekeeping mission, and foreign humanitarian relief. They rejected material humanitarian aid when possible and developed a stance of Christian self-sufficiency, anti-foreign-aid, and anti-dependency. They accepted visits only from American missionaries with “spiritual,” and not material, missions, and they launched their own missions to parts of Haiti unaffected by the quake.
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Small Axe, 2012
Juxtaposing two audiospheres (the Haitian streets after the 2010 earthquake and the “Hope for Hai... more Juxtaposing two audiospheres (the Haitian streets after the 2010 earthquake and the “Hope for Haiti Now” telethon), this essay brings together scholarship on the visuality of suffering with work on music and emotion in order to explore the links between singing and knowledge, between humanitarianism and culture in the Caribbean, and between the photojournalism of disaster and the musicology of the disaster telethon. Even as Haitians sang widely in response to the earthquake, the disaster telethon, in its visual depiction of the sufferers, did not broadcast Haitians singing but rather rendered them unamplified and mute. The telethon focused on the emotionality of the American popular singers, and overwrote the story of the disaster with an American way of knowing, divorced entirely from Caribbean narratives, histories, and understandings. McAllister crystallizes connections between realms that might otherwise be difficult to discern: privatized humanitarianism, emotion, celebrity, entertainment, and the mediatized image of the Caribbean nation of Haiti.
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Books by Elizabeth A . McAlister
Articles & Chapters by Elizabeth A . McAlister
of Vodou incorporates many Catholic elements. Why, then, is Jesus
Christ relatively deemphasized in both traditions, while Mary and
the countless saints and spirits have a greater presence in the religious
lives of most Haitians? This article delves into the Roman Catholic
and Kongolese Catholic history of Haiti to explore why Jesus Christ
is a relatively remote figure and why he is represented as white in a
Black-majority country.
of Vodou incorporates many Catholic elements. Why, then, is Jesus
Christ relatively deemphasized in both traditions, while Mary and
the countless saints and spirits have a greater presence in the religious
lives of most Haitians? This article delves into the Roman Catholic
and Kongolese Catholic history of Haiti to explore why Jesus Christ
is a relatively remote figure and why he is represented as white in a
Black-majority country.