The Armstrong Lectures at Kalamazoo College are made possible by the Homer J. Armstrong Endowment in Religion. Established in 1969 in honor of Dr. Homer J. Armstrong, eminent pastor and long-time trustee of Kalamazoo College. The fund was provided through the generosity of numerous friends of the College.
The Spring 2024 Armstrong Lecture
Thursday, May 2
4:15 p.m. EST
Olmsted Room, Mandelle Hall
Followed by a Meet and Greet with Dr. Nwokocha
This year’s guest speaker is
Dr. Eziaku Nwokocha is an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami, FL. She is a scholar of Africana religions with expertise in the ethnographic study of Vodou in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. Her research is grounded in gender and sexuality studies, visual and material culture and Africana Studies. Dr. Nwokocha is the author of Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2023
“What Do the Gods Want?”:
Visual and Material Culture in African Diaspora Religions
This talk explores the embodied sartorial practices of Haitian Vodou that are produced and transformed within transnational communities in the African Diaspora. Dr. Nwokocha will address how fashion in the religious and social life of Vodou accentuates the importance of aesthetic trends to communal identity formation in the African Diaspora. Her primary sites of research are the temples of a Haitian Vodou practitioner named Manbo Maude in Mattapan, Massachusetts and in Jacmel, Haiti. Manbo Maude creates ritual garments and sells them to her practitioners for adornment during religious ceremonies. The production of these ritual garments offers a critical lens through which to discern the adornment practices that are key to serving the spiritual worlds in Haiti and the Diaspora and that reveal a larger economy of fashion and spiritual exchange. Dr. Nwokocha proposes the term spiritual vogue as a multisensorial ritual practice to address the performative use of fashion in Manbo Maude’s temples to unify practitioners and connect with the spirits. Through the presence of the spirits, dress, touch, movement, and the process of being seen, spiritual vogue is an interactive, multisensorial practice for the practitioners, the spirits, and the audience alike. Focusing on Gede, the deity of life death and sex, she demonstrates how religious fashion addresses the transnational relationships created through faith labor, spirit possession, tattoos, and other embodied manifestations of Vodou. Manbo Maude’s temples are investigated as sites of religious innovation that reflect the dynamic relationship between religious ritual, material aesthetics, and spiritual embodiment within African Diasporic religions.
The lecture is free and open the public
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Past Guest Lecturers
2023, May 2, Dr. Edward Curtis
2021, October 27: Dr. Andrea Jain
2021, February 23: Dr. Amanullah De Sondy
2019, May 7: Dr. Robert Orsi
2018, March 5: Dr. Judith Weisenfeld
2017, February 15: Dr. Tisa Wenger
2016, May 4: Dr. Sufia Uddin
2015, May 13: Dr. Kathryn Lofton
2014, May 15: Dr. Pamela Klassen
2013, April 10: Dr. Karen King
2012, May 14: Dr. Ann Taves
2010, October 21: Dr. David Hackett
2010, February 15: Dr. Wendy Dongier
2008, May 01: Dr. Emilie M. Townes
2006, October 12: Dr. Vasudha Narayanan
2005, November 3: Dr. Bernard McGinn