“Vodou Nation investigates the lives and works of the principal Haitian elite composers who sought cosmopolitan respect as well as national acceptance through the production of nationalist art music. It is also the story of those who followed such musical trends and consumed Haitian elite music and culture. Entertaining and tightly organized, this book explores insightfully the role of art music in mediating tensions in postcolonial societies.”--Gage Averill, Dean, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto
— Gage Averill
“Michael Largey’s Vodou Nation offers a nuanced history and revealing interpretation of the vital role of Haitian composers in constructing national ideology for both domestic and foreign audiences. Largey at once sets forth the important role of compositional activism, explores the ethnographic processes through which the music is constituted, and narrates the emerging politics of Haitian art music. This groundbreaking book stands to make an important contribution to multiple fields well beyond the boundaries of musical scholarship.”--Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and African and African American Studies, Harvard University
— Kay Kaufman Shelemay
"Largey skillfully reconstructs the literary and intellectual climate that shaped Haitian music in the Western tradition. . . . A major contribution."
— G. Fleurant, Transforming Anthropology
“Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism offers a compelling account of the agencies and actions of Haitian elites in the period of the 1890s through the 1950s and the development of misik savant ayisyen (Haitian art music). Michael Largey presents a series of well-crafted and finely detailed discussions that foreground the lives and works of selected Haitian intellectuals and art music composers as well as some of their African American counterparts in the United States. These biographies are interwoven within the shifting political fortunes and social alliances among Haitian elites, the foundation of a ‘modern’ Haitian ethnological movement, and the materialization of cosmopolitan diasporic imaginings of an emergent black consciousness. Largey argues that Haitian elites increasingly employed Vodou-inspired cultural practices and aesthetics in their efforts to promote a vibrant and, importantly, ‘authentic’ Haitian national culture.”
— William Hope, American Ethnologist