Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
62. Is Voudou dangerous?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Emily Clark [+]
Gonzaga University
Emily Suzanne Clark is associate professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University where she teaches undergraduate courses in American Religions. She is the author of A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and co-editor of Race and New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader (Bloomsbury, 2019). She has also published on New Orleans Voudou, Jesuit missions in the Pacific Northwest, and the Moorish Science Temple.
Description
This chapter unpacks why outsiders to the tradition of New Orleans Voudou depicted it as something dangerous. The tradition’s African origins and its ongoing resistance to white supremacy led white citizens to see Voudou as something abnormal, immoral, and uncontrollable.