[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.
