Thornton addresses a puzzle in Vodou and in a number of other African American religious traditions: how Catholic saints came to stand alongside deities drawn from Yoruba and Fon practice.

Two claims carry the argument. The first is that the saints came primarily out of the Catholic Kingdom of Kongo. The second explains why it was the Yoruba-Fon gods in particular who joined them: most religions of Atlantic Africa attach their spirits to a specific place or people, but this tradition has deities that travel and whose authority can extend anywhere, which made them fit company for saints in a way other African deities were not.

Outsiders have read Haitian Vodou through stereotype for two centuries — as the antithesis of civilization in the nineteenth, as demonic possession and zombis during the American occupation, as horror-film material in the 1980s. The careful ethnographies of Herskovits, Métraux, Deren and others were written against that backdrop and marked by it.

Dubois surveys four works from the 1990s that register a shift, among them Cosentino's museum catalogue on Vodou's sacred arts and collections on Afro-Atlantic religion more broadly. He gives most attention to Joan Dayan's Haiti, History and the Gods, which reads possession as a form of historical memory: Dessalines returning as the lwa Ogou Dessaline, and Ezili — the pale, French-speaking Freda beside the black, voiceless, violent Dantò — as a medium for the sexual and racial domination the colony produced. Taken together, these books make the case for treating religion and history as a single problem.