Thursday, September 30**, 12:30-2:00 pm: ** Please note special date (Luncheon seminar, Institute of French Studies, New York University, 15 Washington Mews) Kate RAMSEY - "Law Always Has a Trap Inside of It": Repression and Representation of Vodou during the U.S. Occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) (in English)
Kate Ramsey is an assistant professor of History at the University of Miami. She works on the Caribbean with a particular focus on Haiti. Her recently completed book The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011.
Abstract: Shortly after the catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti on January 12, 2010, editorials appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal claiming that the Vodou religion (glossed as “voodoo”) was a progress-impeding and poverty-producing force in the country. Such charges were not new, and as this talk examines the United States military occupation of Haiti between 1915-1934 was a particularly important crucible for the development of these ideologies. Ramsey examines how the repression of Vodou during the occupation played a key role in the construction of images of Haitian popular ritualism that circulated internationally thereafter. Yet practitioners, marines, and other local observers interpreted this penal regime in unexpected ways, and some of the images it produced were embedded with the seeds of their own critique. The talk closes with an analysis of how one of the most enduring figures of occupation-era representation, the “zombie,” can be read as an incisive popular critique of the occupation’s manifold socioeconomic disruptions in rural Haiti.