Digital Loa and Faith You Can Taste: Hoodoo in the American Imagination

Abstract

Utilizing popular culture mediums and artifacts, this dissertation examines the ways in which the American imaginary plasticizes the faith of Hoodoo and continually strips it of its religious, historic, and cultural impacts. Rather than being acknowledged as a religion, Hoodoo is presented in cultural mediums as something inherently consumable, commercial, and capable of endless, identical reproductions. The artifacts produced around this plastic representation are contemporary reproductions of racist, colonial, and paternalistic historic narratives that have damaging effects both on the religion and Black bodies. The dissertation argues that larger American culture perpetually reproduces these representations to profit from covert racism and religious paternalism while simultaneously erasing its history of Black culture and American colonialism.