Cleophat and Joseph open from a complaint: scholarship on Vodou has largely treated it as something that sprang up in Saint-Domingue on its own, without African antecedents, and has said little about its debt to Yoruba religion. The collection is built to close that gap.

Its chapters compare Vodou with African traditions, Yoruba and Egyptian religion among them, on the argument that shared patterns of belief and ritual can be read as evidence of continuity between the continent and its diaspora, and can clarify Vodou's mythology and practice.

The editors also insist that Vodou be read across borders and cultures, and in the political and economic circumstances that produced competing versions of it. Contributors come from ethnomusicology, performance studies, anthropology and other fields, and work with feminist, queer, Marxist, postcolonial and psychoanalytic frameworks, building a composite account of how the religion has shaped Haitian self-understanding.