Indrajit Mukherjee, (2025). Performing the Otherness: Vodou/Voodoo as a Cultural Marker of Subaltern Resistance in Magical Realist Narratives. In: Bacon, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24734-7_113-1
Abstract
The Vodou/Voodoo exercises, often associated with the Aja, Ewe, Kongo, and Wolof people of the pre-colonial West African continent, refer to the cultural marker of the Indigenous space of the Haiti Islands. This religious iconography in the marginalized site of Haiti is one of the most lethal forms of Black resistance against the constricting ideologies of master-slavery dialectics, capitalism/neo-colonialism, imperialism, racial prejudices, and other inhumane methods evoked by hundreds of Blacks in their everyday existence within the White population of First World countries. In other words, the Vodou/Voodoo ritual assembles a paradigm of protest in which exploited Blacks have become empowered to combat the ideological state apparatuses of the oppressive White system, such as rape, murder, lynching, and other forms of brutal atrocities against them. As Indigenous mythology is one of the fundamental principles in the magical realist narratives, the Vodou/Voodoo belief forms part of the zombification of the exoticized image of alterity, the polar opposite of White discourse, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, and civilized behavior. It signals “the impossible event so that the reader is not obliged to opt for either the natural or the supernatural version, but rather to revise […] the separation of those zones of meaning” (Carpentier, Alejo, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1995: 76). As an integral aspect of Haitian myth, the Vodou/Voodoo performance of the Black priest forges into a scathing indictment of the White worldview of looking upon Blacks and their Indigenous culture as symbols of otherness in their geo-political land.
First, the proposed chapter will shed light on the historiography of the emergence of the epistemologies of the elusive yet endangered Vodou/Voodoo views of the African enslaved people in the Haitian Creole orthography. It will delve into how magical realist novels center around this African spiritualism and folklore as a tool for postcolonial resistance against the prevailing structures of the autocratic Whites. Literary works to be considered within the corpus of this chapter are Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) for exploring the ontologies of Vodou/Voodoo doctrine as a language of effective resistance. Taking a cue from Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of “heterotopia,” the present chapter will try to denote how these three texts employ the Vodou/Voodoo ritualistic practice to construct an alternative spatiotemporal site within the hegemony of the imperialist people.
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