Nwokocha's subject is the tight weave of sacred and secular life in Haitian Vodou, where spirits bear on what Black practitioners do from one day to the next.

That connection, she argues, shows itself in the interplay among four things: ceremonies held in public, the material aesthetics that surround them, the adornment of the body, and possession by the spirits. The book treats these as one dynamic set of relations rather than separate topics.

Maya Deren traveled to Haiti in the 1950s and was initiated as a manbo. Daniels uses her case to ask what it means when white North Americans convert to religions long practiced almost entirely by people of color — a question she approaches through Vodou's own cosmology, in which the dead come to rest in Afrik-Ginen, an underwater homeland described as the legendary site of racial origin but never expressly closed to whites.

The essay sets out a working theory of whiteness, then treats the earlier history of North American conversion to Buddhism as a precedent for white initiation into African diasporic traditions. Deren's standing as an immigrant artist, Daniels argues, gave her a sideways relation to whiteness and let her understand the journey to Haiti as a homecoming. What she entered was a system of ritual kinship whose obligations reached well past the boundaries of the living.

Pressley-Sanon assembles her account of Haiti from oral stories and visual art gathered on the island and in two African countries she treats as its motherlands.

The aim is recovery — histories that have gone under the surface — and the means are drawn from Haiti's own deep spiritual and cultural traditions, which supply the book its method rather than merely its material.

Bellegarde-Smith and Michel set out the metaphysical architecture of Haitian Vodou while refusing the habitual sorting of religions into center and margin. Vodou, in their account, is a religion of the Americas whose metaphysics has grown into something like a national ethos, anchored in past and present time alike.

The serpent pair Danbala and Ayida serves as their organizing figure. Through these lwa the essay traces how the sacred breaks into ordinary life, how devotees negotiate with divine energies, how ritual lineage and family descent intertwine, and how gender is understood in terms too intricate for a simple binary. The same pair opens onto reflection about the natural world.

What emerges from these threads is a cluster of linked ideas: the oneness of being, the pursuit of equilibrium, and konesans, a wisdom that absorbs knowledge into itself — all gathered in the image of the rainbow serpents' cosmic egg.

Lasirenn belongs to a wide family of Afro-Atlantic water spirits, kin to Mami Wata and to mermaid figures from both African and European sources, and her attributes have shifted with the circumstances of those who serve her. Szeles takes that fluidity as the point, and pursues it through the stories told about her, her rituals, and above all her drawn signs.

Much of the essay is close reading of the vèvè. Spirals become eggs, or the southern point of the Kongo cosmogram where things begin again; a vertical line marks the axis toward the ancestors; a diamond refracts one self into many facets, and the whole figure resolves into a womb. What these images offer, in her account, is a means of repairing the natal alienation Orlando Patterson identified as slavery's core injury — reconnecting the living to Ginen and letting a person gather her disparate versions into a whole.

American newspapers describe Haiti as failed, and as the poorest country in the hemisphere, laying its troubles at its own door while saying little of the outside forces that helped produce them. Potter tests that pattern empirically.

The approach is critical geopolitics, applied to a single year of coverage: everything five leading U.S. papers ran in 2004, examined for the vocabulary applied to the country and for the frames that vocabulary builds up.

Behind the method sits a line of criticism showing that how a place is represented can settle what counts as common sense about it, and can make social inequality look warranted. Potter's stated hope is that naming these images opens the way to rethinking how Haiti is popularly seen, and to a different conversation about it, one large enough to hold the whole country's story. Only then, the argument goes, can its problems be addressed.

Gine, the Kreyol word usually translated as Africa, carries more than one meaning in Vodou, and McGee argues that the slippage between them is what makes claims about African authenticity work. Gine names a lost continent, but it also names the world of the spirits, a forested place beneath the waters and behind mirrors. Songs that send prayers from Afrikan toward Gine show the two are not the same.

Understood as an aesthetic rather than a geography, Gine becomes a resource that can be claimed and fought over. McGee finds a parallel in Candomble, where practices presented as African survivals were assembled in twentieth-century Brazil, and reviews work by Richman, Apter and Palmie that sets aside the hunt for origins and reads the Rada and Petwo distinction through class, creolization and morality instead.

Priests, and later outside scholars and artists, helped fix what counted as authentic, though comparable distinctions were already legible to colonial observers.

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.

Two contradictions frame Hurbon's account. Vodou took shape under slavery and helped bring it down, yet independent Haiti banned it and both state and Catholic Church spent the following century persecuting it. And when the elite finally acknowledged it in the 1930s as part of the national culture, the recognition was promptly exploited by a dictatorship that ran from 1957 to 1986.

Ritual and possession cannot be understood apart from that political history, which is also why the elite could not treat Vodou as a religion at all. What emerged from the meeting of African and European practice is something he describes as a dialogue with the other carried on internally — a religion with no ambition to conquer. Undoing the prejudice adherents have absorbed about themselves will take open public debate rather than ethnography, and a state that protects belief without legislating on it.

Hebblethwaite approaches the history of Haitian Creole through the language of Vodou. The rites and the sacred songs performed during services are in Haitian Creole, but their vocabulary reaches well beyond it, carrying items traceable to West African languages such as Fon, Yoruba, Ewe and Igbo, as well as to West Central African sources.

The available description breaks off at that point, before the study's findings, so its conclusions about those borrowings are not represented here.