publication

This article renders a history of Haitian folkloric dance that accounts for its “ghostly matters,” meaning the haunted legacies still hovering around transmissions and performances of folkloric dance. Focusing on the dance’s mid-twentieth century formation, this analysis weaves together scholarship with the author’s own archival, ethnographic, and oral historical research. The construction and codification of “Haitian folkloric dance” emerges through the labor and knowledge of Haitian actors—Lina Mathon Blanchet, Jean-Léon Destiné, Emerante de Pradines, Louinès Louinis, Pierre Desrameaux, Viviane Gauthier—combined with the influence of Katherine Dunham, Lavinia Williams, anti-Vodou and colonial Eurocentric ideologies, Western aesthetics, social scientific study, tourism, urbanization, and transnational migration.