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Paper short abstract:

I argue that media portraits of Vodou in South Florida, USA, invariably associating the tradition with acts that violate the criminal code, play a crucial role in the imperial delegitimization of the religion and constitutes a form of duress Vodou practitioners must contend with.

Paper long abstract:

When deemed to be necessary, practitioners of Vodou would engage its rituals and discourse in negotiating the bottlenecks they encounter in a south Floridian mainstream legal system in which the balance of power seldom tilts in their favor. In the south Floridian mainstream media, however, Vodou is hardly presented as a legitimate religious practice. Rather, the image conveyed of Vodou in the mediascape of south Florida is one that depicts it as a complex of clandestine magico religious performances individuals and groups engage in performing crime and in escaping detection. What seems more intriguing is that when apprehended by law enforcement agents, some criminals would, in turn, press this public discourse and image of Vodou into service. They would shift the blame for crimes for which they are culpable onto a Vodou curse or another form of Vodou influence over which, they would allege, they had little or no control, hoping desperately to use this as a legal defense strategy. In the process, actual performers of crime reinforce the negative stereotypes of Vodou as a repository of criminal resources produced initially by the media

Drawing on newspaper articles, news items, and YouTube video clips etc. featuring stories of criminals using Vodou or claiming so in south Florida, I show how claims about Vodou’s illegitimacy are fictitious and culturally produced wittingly or unwittingly through such quotidian practices by agents of the American empire who control the mediascape and criminals.