Date of Award
Spring 5-2019
Degree Type
Honors College Thesis
Department
History
First Advisor
Matthew Casey
Advisor Department
History
Abstract
Voodoo transitioned from a religion that caused its practitioners to be criminalized and apprehended by the state to a lure used to entice visitors to the Crescent City. This thesis attemtps to show how the public perception of Voodoo shifted in the late nineteenth-century from a hidden threat to a public novelty. I explain this shift through analyzing New Orleans guidebooks, newspapers, and court cases at the turn of the twentieth-century. This thesis fills the gap in the scholarship pertaining to the twentieth-century. I achieve this by drawing upon more extensive literature on the oppression of African-derived religions in other decades, such as the 1850s in New Orleans, and other locations, such as Latin America and the Caribbean. Because of its association with African Americans, Voodoo was deemed a purely black superstition and a form of primitivism. Yet, it was feared for being the exact opposite–a powerful tool used by workers to invert prevailing social hierarchies of southern Jim Crow segregation.
Copyright
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Recommended Citation
Cole, Kendra, "The State and the Spirits: Voodoo and Religious Repression in Jim Crow New Orleans" (2019). Honors Theses. 658.
https://aquila.usm.edu/honors_theses/658