This book recuperates the important history that Haitian thought around Vodou possession has had in French critical theory. The author takes the period of the 1930s and `40s, as the centerfold of a more complex network of relations that places Haiti as one of the pivots of a more expanded intellectual conversation around "possession," which links anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, human rights, and visual arts in France, Haiti, and the United States. Benedicty argues that Haiti as the anthropological other serves as a kick-starter to an entire French-based theoretical apparatus (Breton, Leiris, Bataille, de Certeau, Foucault, and Butler), but once up and running, its role as catalyst is forgotten and the multiple iterations of the anthropological other are cast back into the net of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's "Savage slot." The book offers the reader unfamiliar with Haiti a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of twentieth and early twenty-first century Haitian thought, including a detailed timeline of important moments in the intellectual history that connects Haiti to France and the United States. The first part of the book is about global dispossessions in the first decades of the twentieth century; the second part points to how the narratives of `Haiti' are intimately linked to a Franco-U.S.-American discursive space, constructed over the course of the twentieth century, a discursive order that has conflated the representation of `Haiti' with an understanding of Vodou primarily as an occult religion, and not as a philosophical system. The third and fourth parts of the book examine how the novels of Rene Depestre, Jean-Claude Fignole, and Kettly Mars have revisited the notion of possession since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorships.
Table of Contents Preface. Haitian Studies, French Critical Theory, and Postcolonial Theory Acknowledgments Introduction. Possession, Dispossession, and Self-Possession: From Pathology to Healing, Braiding Intellectual Histories Part I. Dispossessions: Nationhood, Citizenship, Personhood, and Poverty Chapter 1. Hegel and Agamben: Materializing Philosophy, Philosophizing the Material Chapter 2. States of Exceptions: Dayan, Trouillot, and Mbembe Chapter 3. The Newest Utopia: `Ending Poverty' Chapter 4. Mbembe's "Unhappiness" and Trouillot's "Fundamentally New Subjects" Part II. Possession Dispossessed: Pathologizing and a `Western' Intellectual History of Possession Chapter 5. `Unhappiness' as Taboo: Anthropology, Psychology, and the Disciplining of `Possession' Chapter 6: Fostering Revolution? Breton's "Haitian Lectures" Chapter 7: Leiris, "Le grand possede": Ethiopia, Europe, and Haiti Chapter 8: From Haiti to Brazil, From Herskovits to Metraux: Anthropology and Human Rights Chapter 9: Verger's Image in Bataille's Tears of Eros: Hollier's Dispossessed Intellectuals and Vodou Thought Chapter 10: Possession, a Threshold to a Biopolitical Order: De Certeau, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Athena Athanasiou Part III. Repossessing Possession: After Franco-American Ethnography, after Duvalier-Vodou in Depestre's Hadriana dans tous mes reves Chapter 11. Hadriana. The "Autofiction" of the (Anti)Hero of "A New World Mediterranean" Chapter 12. The West's Obsession with Defining Art: Hadriana's Joust with an Aesthetic-Empirical Order of Things Chapter 13. Between Franketienne and Glissant: Hadriana's Realpolitik Part IV. Self-Repossession: The Dispossessed and Their "New Subjectivities"-Jean-Claude Fignole's and Kettly Mars's Novels Chapter 14. On "Un-Becoming" Racial: Jean-Claude Fignole's Aube Tranquille Chapter 15. Repossession as Staying and Dwelling: Kettly Mars's L'Heure Hybride and Aux frontieres de la Soif Appendix A. Timeline combining general contexts for transatlantic and hemispheric Atlantic thought, particularly in France, Haiti, and the U.S.A. Bibliography Index About the author
