Circling the Cosmograms: Feminist Art, Vodou, and Dyasporic (Re)turns to Post-Quake Hait

Circling the Cosmograms marks the first full-length study of second-generation feminist and/or queer art and performance in the Haitian Dyaspora (Haitian Kreyol spelling) following the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Through archival research, visual and performance art analysis, and in-depth interviews, I document the ways feminist and/or queer Haitian-American artists use a Vodou aesthetic in their art practice to "circle the cosmograms," to "(re)turn" back to Haiti physically, artistically, and spiritually. I animate the contemporary aestheticization of Vodou by feminist and/or queer 1.5 and second-generation Haitian-Americans to chronicle how Vodou has made it possible for a group of people, having been historically marginalized both in Haiti and in Dyaspora, to (re)turn to Haiti, and by extension Ginen---ancestral Africa in the Vodou tradition.;Performance is used to frame the everyday and aesthetic applications of Vodou in the lives and art works of women in the post-quake Haitian Dyaspora. I attend to how Vodou simultaneously performs itself and is performed by artist---how Vodou serves as a philosophical, moral, and aesthetic praxis. By attending to performance---in the everyday and in art---I archive the ways Haitian-American artists creatively share their own experiences witnessing the earthquake while simultaneously attending to the shifts in their political commitments as well as their art practices pre- and post-quake. In documenting these female and/or queer artists' aesthetic, transnational, and political shifts, I crystallize art as a means of indexing the effects of the earthquake on Haitian-American cultural practice, subject-formation, and feminist/queer interventions and organizing both in Haiti and the larger Dyaspora.;I theorize circling the cosmograms---the return to Haitian Vodou---through a discussion of five artists and their works: Rejin Leys (b. 1966, mixed-media and paper artist); Lenelle Moise (b. 1980, poet-playwright); Regine Romain (b. 1974, photographer); Gina Athena Ulysse (b. 1973, scholar-performer) and my own work as a storyteller-dancer-visual artist. Through these artists and our works I investigate the four tactics of "circling the cosmograms": 1) seeing dyasporically; 2) a Dyasporic lakou praxis; 3) the aesthetics of the lwa; and 4) crossing pedagogies, bridging the sacred and the scholarly. The performance of each individual tactic structures how these artists use their given mediums to intervene, critique, and/or challenge representations of women, Haitian people, and Dyaspora both within and beyond Haiti.