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I V Whosoever Doubts My Power: Conjuring Feminism in the Interwar

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I V Whosoever Doubts My Power: Conjuring Feminism in the Interwar Whosoever Doubts My Power: Conjuring Feminism in the Interwar Black Diaspora by Marina Sofia Magloire Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Aarthi Vadde, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Laurent Dubois ___________________________ N. Gregson Davis ___________________________ Nathaniel Mackey Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 i v ABSTRACT Whosoever Doubts My Power: Conjuring Feminism in the Interwar Black Diaspora by Marina Sofia Magloire Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Aarthi Vadde, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Laurent Dubois ___________________________ N. Gregson Davis ___________________________ Nathaniel Mackey An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Copyright by Marina Sofia Magloire 2017 Abstract This dissertation uses the revolutionary potential of Caribbean religion to theorize black feminism between the two World Wars. It argues that women artists and performers across the diaspora produced both ethnographic and artistic representations of Haitian Vodou (and its sister religions) in order to formulate a radical and pan-African feminism. Unlike accounts of the savagery and hedonism of a sensationalized “voodoo” perpetuated by white male travelers to Haiti, black women’s narratives of Vodou focused specifically on its status as a theology of resistance. By re-animating apolitical narratives of “voodoo” with their original spiritual provenance in Vodou, women of color laid claim to the political force of the religion behind the largest successful slave revolt in the Western hemisphere. Over four chapters, the Vodou lens of “Whosoever Doubts My Power” shows that black feminism and black radicalism are inextricable. Following the tradition of Karen McCarthy Brown and Natasha Omi’seke Tinsley, I take the religious forms of the African diaspora as potential sources of feminist political mobilization. Haitian Vodou, hoodoo of the American South, and other Afro-diasporic cosmologies allow women to attain the highest positions of leadership (Marie Laveau), and to follow the example of powerful female spirits (Ezili). My dissertation unpacks the radical underpinnings of Afro-Caribbean religious symbology in works by and about black women. In doing so, I address the gender imbalance in scholarship on interwar figures such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, which often portrays the black radicalism of the interwar period as an endeavor crafted solely by men. If, as Brent Edwards argues, “black radicalism is an internationalization,” I seek to call attention to the transnational movements of women in this time period, despite their more limited iv access to international circuits. “Whosoever Doubts My Power” bridges the works of Anglophone, Francophone, and Creolophone women whose paths crossed, collided, or simply ran parallel in the shared transnational dream of the voodoo queen. I also include the life and travels of little-researched figures like the essayist Suzanne Césaire and the performer Florence Emery Jones in order to correct the archival elisions of black women’s contributions to the construction of a Pan-African radical tradition. At times metaphorical, at other times quite literal, this dissertation argues that Black female artists deployed African-derived religious practice in order to intentionally blur the line between cultural inheritance and invention. These practices were not just a means of deflecting or circumventing racism and misogyny; rather, engagements with New World religions became a world ordering system, a cosmology meant to replace the traditions that had been lost over time and in the Middle Passage. Often, these practices were processes of invention as much as they were processes reclamation. In fact, the power of the voodoo/Vodou lens lies precisely in its liminal status between factuality and invention, between myth and history. In a lacunar archive of the Middle Passage that makes past African traditions unknowable and Pan-African solidarity untenable, Afro-diasporic artists must come to terms with the lost of their histories and communities. However, rather than succumbing to the loss of that realization, Black artists of the interwar period used the idea of Vodou to conjure imagined histories and mobilize imagined communities in the present. It was not so much the end of a worldview as the beginning of one. v Contents Abstract..........................................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. viii 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 2. The Spirit of Dessalines Possessed Me: Dancing Diaspora............................................... 24 2.1 Orgiastically Successful: The Challenge of Haiti ....................................................... 26 2.2 The Old Gods Come Home to Harlem ........................................................................ 35 2.3 An Ethics of Discomfort: Katherine Dunham in Haiti .............................................. 43 2.4 “The Essence of Life Seemed in Bodily Motion;” or, Helga Crane in the Jungle .. 52 3. Witchcrafts of Color: The Doudou’s Vodou........................................................................ 63 3.1 Strange Fruits: Women, Nature, and the Challenge of the Doudou....................... 67 3.2 A Man Who Questions: The Woman of Color and the Black Man ......................... 72 3.3 The Doudou’s Revenge: Suzanne Césaire’s Grand Camouflage............................. 84 3.4 Coda: Surprise and Solitude ......................................................................................... 95 4. Looking for Marie: Hoodoo Histories and the Making of a Black Feminist Genealogy ........................................................................................................................................................ 99 4.1 The Silence of the Initiated ............................................................................................ 99 4.2 The Crown of Power .................................................................................................... 110 4.3 The Black Cat Bone....................................................................................................... 121 5. Florence’s Place: Host(ess)ing Revolution in Interwar Black Paris ............................... 136 5.1 Bricktop’s Place ............................................................................................................. 141 5.2 Cults of Leadership: The Scene of Interwar Black Nationalism ............................ 152 5.3 Florence’s Place ............................................................................................................. 164 6. Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 177 References................................................................................................................................... 183 vi Biography ................................................................................................................................... 191 vii Acknowledgements Thank you to the whole village of people who have never doubted my power. My parents and my siblings, David and Claudia. My committee members Aarthi Vadde (who was there from the beginning), Priscilla Wald, Gregson Davis, Laurent Dubois, and Nate Mackey. Jecca Namakkal, who was a wonderful model in teaching and activism. I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for enabling my travels and scholarship through a 2016-2017 Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and to the staff at the wonderful archives it allowed me to visit, including the New York Public Library, the Emory Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, and the Archives nationale d’outre mer. Over the past six years, I have had the privilege of learning the life of the mind occurs mostly outside of the classroom, in places like: Durham. Jessica Hines and Carolyn Laubender, who have been a constant source of support throughout these past six years. For your strong and forgiving belief in me, I thank you. Kita, who will forever be my model of kindness, composure, and love. Brenna, who always has jokes and will always provide the most exalted hospitality when it is most needed. My Holy Cross Family—Miss Gloria, Chico, Mr. Frankie, Miss Dreda, Allison, Venus, Verietta—for always accepting me without any need for explanation. Allison Curseen, for showing me sisterly love from the beginning and being a model in scholarship and prayer. Roxanne Campbell, for letting me so wholeheartedly into your world and having the courage to try. New Orleans. Don Edwards, who is the wisest person I’ve ever known and who will excuse, I
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