Haiti and Being: Vodoun, Zombies and the Plantation Continuum
Creators: name: Sylvain, Patrick
Publisher: name: Brandeis University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Ontology of Race
subject: Plantation Continuum
subject: Slavery
subject: Vodoun
subject: Zombies
subject: Haiti
subject: Philosophy
subject: FOS: Philosophy, ethics and religion

description: “Haiti and Being” examines Black beingness through metaphoric signification of the zombie figure of Haitian Vodoun. While literary studies of the Zombie have understood the figure as the ultimate metaphor of non-being and the liminal threshold between life and death, the decolonizing potential of the Zombie figure, especially within the tradition of Haitian Vodoun, is not well explored. By reading Haiti as a liminal and temporal sphere of existence, it becomes a precarious container, an enervated abode, for being. Thus, Haiti and Haitianness will not be read purely as nation and nationality, but as existence within a particular form and drive for essence (mode of being) within a colonial continuum that includes the American military occupation (1915-34). Drawing on Black Atlantic studies, postcolonial and decolonial theories, Black feminist theory, phenomenology and dialectical materialism, I read the Western amalgamation of the Haitian peasantry as a collective of primitives through metaphors of the “demonic” zombie alongside the resistance works of critical Haitian and non-Haitian writers and filmmakers. Materials I analyze include: Meagan Boudreaux’s Miracle on Voodoo Mountain; Hugh B. Cave’s The Cross on the Drum; Edna Taft’s A Puritan in Voodoo Land; Edwidge Danticat’s Farming of Bones; Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell my Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, and the Marcelin brothers’ Canapevert. I also analyze films such as White Zombie (1932); King of the Zombies (1941); I Walk with a Zombie (1943); as well as Western travelogues/memoirs on Haiti. I show how on the one hand, print media and film representations of the Zombie endowed the figure with a socio-linguistic vitality that allowed it to metastasize into the realm of disease, pandemic, politics, social psychology, and a feared crisis of existence (permanent state of servitude) within a capitalistic context. Consequently, I argue that this grotesque figure and the mischaracterization of African-based religious and cultural practices help to codify racial profiling and the rendering of the black body as supernatural, spectral, and disposable. I also argue that the alternative production of the Zombie in the work of critical Haitian and non-Haitian writers reframes Black beingness in two crucial ways: one, as a product of a colonial continuum that includes plantation politics, the ongoing neocolonial American occupation of Haiti, the labor exploitation of Haitian labor across the Caribbean and the white supremacist agenda against the Haitian revolutionary consciousness; and, two, as a decolonizing figure especially as imagined in Haitian Vodoun, a religion grounded in human and spiritual relationality. By reading through these contradictory discourses, I enlarge the realm of signification of the zombie and highlight its role as an animator of agential acts such as the Haitian Revolution and a Black Atlantic consciousness. My work brings together the fields of Black Atlantic and Caribbean literature, Haitian studies, Marxist theories, continental philosophy, media studies as well as Anthropological theories. Finally, “Haiti and Being” intends to dialectically reformulate and prolong Heidegger’s concept of being in relation to freedom vis-à-vis Western hermeneutics and a constructed hierarchy of being in the world that is intrinsically linked to capital, the plantation, ownership of the other (human possession)—and ultimately, the zombie.