Ainsi parla l'oncle, and after.
Jean Price-Mars published it in 1928, telling a French-educated Haitian elite that despising the peasantry's religion was a form of collective self-hatred. It changed the terms of every Haitian argument about Vodou since. The other indispensable books — Maya Deren's, Karen McCarthy Brown's Mama Lola — are outsiders' and are treated as such.
Jean Price-Mars published Ainsi parla l'oncle in 1928, during the American occupation, and it reoriented Haitian intellectual life. Its argument was directed at the francophone Haitian elite: that in despising the peasantry's religion, language and folklore as African and primitive, they were practising a collective bovarysme, an attempt to be something they were not, and were despising themselves. The book established Vodou and Kreyòl as legitimate objects of study and pride, fed directly into the indigéniste and later négritude movements, and remains the reference point for every Haitian argument about the religion. The other essential works are outsiders' and are treated as such: Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen, written after she went to film dance and was initiated, and Karen McCarthy Brown's Mama Lola, a study of a manbo in Brooklyn conducted over more than a decade, which is generally regarded as the best ethnography of the religion in English.
For four hundred years we have learnt to consider ourselves the poor relations of the French. Nothing is more dangerous than this, because a people that does not believe in itself is a people that cannot be saved.
Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l'oncle, 1928 (rendered)Addressed to the Haitian elite about their contempt for the peasantry's religion.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.