[There are] many fascinating moments in Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken’s rich book on the question of possession as artistic metaphor, intellectual crossroads, and religious practice…. It is constructed perhaps most like a work of literature, its plot sinuous, with meanings accumulated powerfully over the course of a reading. There is a counterpoint between longer chapters, which include detailed close readings of certain texts, and shorter ones with flashes of insight that help to situate and reconfigure what has come before and after. There is a lot to hold together here: varied forms of discursive intervention, a constant return to the question of possession as practice itself within Vodou, different geographical sites and historical moments and basic ways of apprehending and acting within the world. But the book does it marvelously owing both to Benedicty-Kokken’s engaging voice and the solid conceptual direction that undergirds the entire work…. In a sense her interpretation of Depestre is the crossroads of the book, the insights here made possible precisely because of the rich cartography she offers throughout the rest of the work. Here and throughout the work, she allows us to see and understand an entangled intellectual and aesthetic configuration, one in which Haiti has been and is at the centre, in a new and transformative way.

French Studies

Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History is an ambitious and groundbreaking work…. An interdisciplinary, provocative, and engaging study of spirit possession, Benedicty-Kokken’s book provides a rigorous and important analysis of the heretofore underappreciated role of Haitian Vodou in international thought as well as a strong argument for the potential healing possibilities of possession as ‘a practice that should not be pathologized, but held up as a model of dealing with an ever-upsetting and disenfranchised global order’. The intellectual history established here encourages, and no doubt will inspire, further study of possession, especially by Haitian ethnographers and/ or practitioners in Haiti. The breadth and depth of this study make it an essential read for not only Haitian studies and postcolonial scholars, but also for those whose work engages in ethnography, anthropology, philosophy, psychiatry, religious studies, and French studies more generally.

Contemporary French Civilization

All in all, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken has produced a most rigorous theoretical text that deeply probes the notions of possession in Atlantic intellectual history. Relying on Western ethnographic accounts of spirit possession and Haitian literary tropes of ‘self-possession,’ she draws attention to Africans’ historical dispossession of rights to land and citizenship (in tandem with the disavowal of their humanity). In doing so, the author proves her salt as a multidisciplinary scholar capable of integrating several fields of inquiry into Haitian cultural thought. Furthermore, the appendix alone serves as a major contribution to Atlantic intellectual histories of the twentieth century. Most poignantly, the introduction and conclusion offer bookends with invocations of two prominent Haitian scholars…. Indeed, keeping in line with the Latin root of possession—possidere, with potis meaning able, capable and sedere meaning to sit, to inhabit— Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken’s book is one to sit with and inhabit.

Journal of Haitian Studies

The book opens promising paths in that sense and we must salute the audacity of the author’s multicentered reflections as well as her erudition. It also encourages a much-needed interrogation of our methods, assumptions, origins, and cultural influences.

New West Indian Guide

A tour-de-force of interdisciplinary rigor, this book redefines the meaning of postcolonial scholarship, brilliantly crossing historical and archival work with the demands of theoretical speculation. As she takes on the legacy of injustice and evasion at the heart of modernity, Benedicty challenges us to approach the experience of “possession” in vodou as nothing less than a re-imagining of the ethical life.

Colin Dayan, Author of Haiti, History, and the Gods

In this wide-ranging, ambitious, and provocative study, Alessandra Benedicty makes a significant and highly original contribution to new scholarship on Haiti. Entering into dialogue with essential thinkers and engaging with key literary texts, she considers spirit possession within a wider frame of politics, culture, and power. The phenomenon is understood not in terms of pathology and exoticism, but analyzed instead as an active embodiment of thought and as a form of self-narration in a context of persistent disenfranchisement. Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History is an important book. It deserves to be widely read.

Charles Forsdick, University of Liverpool