About the Author

Jana Braziel, Cincinnati, Ohio, is Western College Endowed Professor and chair of global and intercultural studies at Miami University. She has coedited five volumes and is author of Duvalier’s Ghosts: Race, Diaspora, and U.S. Imperialism in Haitian Literatures; Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds; Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora; and Diaspora: An Introduction.

Reviews

The Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux, who saw Vodou as a modern, urban religion, may have been among the first to pay serious attention to what he called the 'veritable junk shop' that found its way onto the altar in Vodou temples. Jana Evans Braziel's Riding with Death takes us from the forties to the present in her original exploration of the hallucinatory assemblages that the artists of the Grand Rue have drawn from the recycled urban trash of Port-au-Prince. Objects charged with magical and supernatural meaning but improvised from the twisted, rusting materials abandoned by global capitalism are analyzed in terms of what she calls Vodou bricolage. Riding with Death is outstanding in its use of theories of imaginative dwelling in urban space to position Haiti in the art historical context of the Americas.--J. Michael Dash, professor of French, New York University