Looking for Laveau
Subtitle: the mythology of Marie Laveau in and out of the archive
By: by Morgan Carter
Contributors: NC Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship (NCDOCKS)
Publisher: [University of North Carolina at Greensboro]
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Greensboro, N.C.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 110
Subjects: Spirituality; Vodou; New Orleans; Black Women
Notes: Abstract: The purpose of this work is to engage with the proliferation of the myth of Marie Laveau, the nineteenth-century Voodoo figure of New Orleans, Louisiana and its multiple potentialities as both a tool of investment in whiteness as a form of intellectual property as well as a subject for myth as uplift, refusal, and resistance in terms of southern black womanhood and the critically imaginary. In this work, I create a trajectory of work that has endeavored to “recover” Laveau within institutionalized forms of knowing, specifically taking to task projects of recovery that attempt to present Laveau as a figure of strong leadership for women through institutionalized spaces and forms of knowledge, such as the archive while simultaneously dismissing other, “nonacademic” proliferations of the Laveau myth. This thesis serves to decenter the research, reading, and writing of the Laveau mythology as within the academy, which ostensibly serves white and normative generated and centered ways of knowing, identifying, and articulating, in favor of a methodology that accounts for cultural forms of mythologies that center memory, lineage, and communal identification. Through this critical work, I hope to supply a critical imaginary of what a Creole/Cajun southern feminism would look like, and how it is deeply intertwined with gendered and racialized nuances that are specific to region and community.

Available online via NCDOCKS.

Thesis University of North Carolina Greensboro 2019.