ABSTRACT
As the site of the fi rst black republic and the center of the African diasporic culture of voodoo, the island of Haiti undoubtedly plays a central role in the African American imagination. Robert Ferris Thompson, in A Flash of the Spirit, notes that Haiti was the site of a deep synthesis of the classical religions of the Yoruba, the Dahomeans, the Bakongo, and the saints of the Roman Catholic Church. Voodoo became, “formally speaking, one of the richest and most misunderstood religions of the planet.”1 Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren, each in turn, attempted to decipher the meaning of voodoo for the community of practitioners, outsiders, and their personal lives.2 Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti and Dunham’s The Dances of Haiti can be counted among founding texts on the anthropology and aesthetics of voodoo. Certainly the cultural richness of voodoo, with its mixture of African and European cosmology and aesthetics, explains in part their attraction, but I would like to attempt a more detailed description of why African diasporic culture had such a powerful attraction for Dunham, an African American, and Deren, a Russian immigrant, in the exploration of their scholarly, spiritual, and artistic lives.
