Contagion with supernatural powers is par for the course in the (mis)understandings of most African diaspora religious cultures, adding to the racist contamination of these ancient, sacred beliefs and traditions. Traversing all syntactic categories and serving as a canopy for many Afro-Atlantic spiritualities, there is one term that singularly carries the torch of a derogatory dimension: voodoo. Far from its original Fon/Dahomeyan dialect, which can indicate “spirit” or “deified being,” the term has mutated into a stamp of stigma, fear, and hate. In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur, historian Danielle N. Boaz cogently applies multidimensional research mechanisms and an exhaustive chronological legal audit that demystify, uncloak, and expose how the troublesome not-so-past demonization of African religious legacies are still swathed under (post)colonial racist intellectual regimes, a product of the savage imagery of the enslavement enterprise. From its spelling to pronunciations, Boaz takes the reader on a historiography of the term “voodoo,” interrogating its origins, meaning, and associated discernments, shedding light on its persecutions and prosecutions throughout time, and how it serves as a xenophobic veneer for many religions of the African diaspora. Boaz examines how as a racial slur, the term “voodoo” has become an inelegant sociocultural smear affixed onto African diaspora peoples and their religious cultures, and how, beyond its ancient origins, its derogatory affect has, for almost two centuries, created a habitude that more specifically villainizes Haitians and their culture, at home and abroad.
The book consists of an introduction and six chapters, each contributing rich interventions centering the term “voodoo” as a racist insignia designed to besmirch the profound intellectual and philosophical heritage of diasporic African spiritualities. The introduction opens with a compelling rendering of the January 2010 earthquake that struck Haiti at a 7.0 magnitude and the immediate bedlam that ensued, directed against Vodou (the respectful Haitian Kreyol variation) practitioners at the hands of Christian zealots. Boaz here establishes the premise of the book by stating that “‘voodoo’ has extremely racist origins and has been used to denigrate people of African descent and their spiritual practices since its inception” (ix). In contrast, the text mentions variations of terms used to describe other Afro-diasporic religious traditions embraced by adherents but may be misunderstood as pejorative by unfamiliar observers. From the onset, Boaz offers a valuable understanding of the complexities that shroud the term “voodoo” and its wholesale adoption by mainstream media, and how these created a chronic sociocultural stereotype extremely difficult to erase.
Chapter 1, “Emancipation, Civil Rights, and the Origins of ‘Voodoo’ in the 1850s – 1880s,” is devoted to the historicity and conceptual derivations of the term “voodoo” and its unraveling from its French origins – vaudoux– and moves forward to detail the superstitious articulations and logics that emerge during the U.S. Civil War. Boaz here provides a detailed account of the impact print media had in helping migrate suppositions of “voodoo” practices from the United States to the Caribbean, amplifying America’s imperialistic agenda in maintaining the region unemancipated legally, emotionally, and spiritually. While unpacking the Caribbean conundrum, and following Cuba’s independence, chapter 2,“‘Voodoo’ and U.S. Imperialism in Cuba in the 1890s – 1920s,” examines the expansion of systemized racial typecasts set against African religious practices in Cuba. These preconceived distorted accounts of what Boaz calls “voodooisms” seeped onto the island via U.S. interventions that echoed Haiti’s “voodoo agenda” in fear of contagion in Cuba. Thus, Boaz makes a critical intervention in distilling erroneous tropes where some scholars place the first interactions with the term “voodoo” as an export of the U.S. occupation during the early twentieth century. This critical contribution makes clear that the path of “voodoo” as demonizing nomenclature was uncommonly an infiltrated device, augmenting the sensalization associated with Afro-Diasporic ritual practices in the Caribbean, particularly in Haiti and Cuba. Returning to the U.S., in “'Love Cults' and 'White Slaves' in the 1920s,” Boaz unfolds a series of cases describing trends ranging from the sexploitations of white women and girls, or “white slavery” (56), to other detailed accounts where hyperbolic religio-magical ritualizations associated with “voodoo” detail society’s perception of the term during the early twentieth century, provoking a rationale that, once recognized as a religion, the practice of “voodoo” kept Black people enslaved “through mental and spiritual torment” (75). It is here that Boaz’s text institutes its strongest argument–a clear tenet that the term “voodoo” and its racist, disparaging connotations, like a sharp double-edged knife, cut bilaterally, and there is no way to touch it without causing severe spiritual and emotional injury.
For close to two hundred years, “voodoo” has been synonymous with evil, ignorance, all things diabolical and anti-God, and a plethora of themes connected to the most nefarious and odious sociocultural elements of the inherited traditions and people of the African diaspora. For practitioners of Haitian Vodou, Vodouisant is the term used by Christians to identify Vodou devotees. Another term, Vodou vi, is applied by adherents to describe practitioners who devote their lives to the public, geopolitical dissemination of the religious tradition. But this is as close as a sounds-like pronunciation gets. As Boaz affirms, “voodoo” has no place in Haitian Vodou’s sacred lexicon, justifying this book’s paramount argument that “voodoo” is a weaponizing racist mechanism with a deliberate and calculated design aimed at the dehumanization of a culture and its people. As she closes her pivotal arguments, Boaz signals how “voodoo” has been used in connection with the surveillance and criminalization of Black people in Jamaica with Obeah, and Brazil with Macumba, having experienced similar regimes of persecution in Cuba and its Afro-diasporic traditions earlier in the text. For both the scholar and adherent unaware of the information uncovered in Boaz’s vigorous survey of the history, applications, over and undertones of “voodoo,” this watershed book is indispensable reading, and grateful ancestors, lwa, orishas, and egun alike, will spread ashé across the pages of Danielle Boaz’s work. Ayibobo!
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[Review length: 978 words • Review posted on January 22, 2025]