From colonial Saint-Domingue in the seventeenth century to Haiti after independence, Vodou has been rendered in Haitian thought as something unsettling and paradoxical, in literature, law, politics, history, painting, music, and art alike. Cleophat and Joseph collect chapters arguing that the rival accounts arising from these domains have not merely touched Haitian life but supplied its cosmology and its way of seeing.

Vodou's reach, on this account, extends into Haitian intellectual, aesthetic, and literary imagination, into social ethics, and into thinking about sexuality, gender, and theology, as in Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Roumain, and others. It also shapes how memory, trauma, collective redemption, and diasporic identity are handled by Haitian women writers, Edwidge Danticat and Myriam Chancy among them.

The contributors come from many fields, ethnomusicology and performance through anthropology, economics, philosophy, and theology, and work from queer, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic positions.