Sunday - a day of reflection

May 23, 2021 11:27 AM

Professor Chireau's asks What is Hoodoo? and goes on to explore: Hat Tricks: The Fez and the Turban in Africana Religions and in comics.
Have you heard of the orisha Elegba? one of the most popular avatars in the African diaspora today.
These and much more including Beautiful women with cigars.

I do think that these pictures speak boldly about self-representation by women of color, and about gender, and religion, and about beauty. But what I like most about them is that they simply reflect back what is there. Look closely, and you might detect something there, too: a harbinger of the Spirit, a different form of divinity, a feminine image of God in a woman’s body.

posted by adamvasco (9 comments total)

Shades of Gibson's "Mona Lisa Overdrive", third in his Sprawl trilogy.

Probably considered appropriative these days, but I bet he has plenty of Haitian fans too.
posted by goinWhereTheClimateSuitsMyClothes at 11:39 AM on May 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Got me thinking on American Gods (in before reading...)
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 11:51 AM on May 23, 2021

This man comes to my mind.
posted by y2karl at 12:39 PM on May 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

The page on Hugo Canuto’s Kirby-influenced comics is a thing of beauty.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:41 PM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

There are sections of the website that contain resources should one want to make connections with knowledgeable individuals and experts. There are Hoodoo scholars, Hoodoo practitioners, Hoodoo artists, and teachers of the Hoodoo traditions.

I was not able to locate these resources on her website. I would love to know who she thinks is good.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 5:44 PM on May 23, 2021

There is also Hoodoo in Theory and Practice at Lucky Mojo as mentioned previously.

I still miss Iconomy...
posted by y2karl at 7:46 PM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oh my goodness. I knew Yvonne...oh, a good fifteen years ago now, maybe even a bit more. It's delightful to see her work here on Metafilter. She's absolutely brilliant, and a very warm and kind person. Very much looking forward to reading some of her work here.
posted by kalimac at 7:59 PM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Shades of Gibson's "Mona Lisa Overdrive", third in his Sprawl trilogy.

Count Zero, too, which precedes Mona Lisa Overdrive, as well as Spook Country, second in the so-called Blue Ant Trilogy.

"I was building electronic kits at the time, where you'd order one and get a bunch of parts and solder them together. I remember sitting and reading about the loa and looking at the symbols for each one, and looking over and seeing the Heathkit assembly sheet with all the circuit diagrams and wondering what circuit would be produced if you used the Voodoo book instead. Some of that stayed with me, and when I wrote Count Zero, I just used it all. I did it from memory, though. And the memory was way back, and so it was all kind of distorted in an interesting way, and it gave me my own cyberspace version of that. But I never bothered to do any research.

With Spook Country, I had read a little bit more, and I had found a more feminine description of it, somehow, which became the orisha. It was almost more Catholic in some way than whatever I was drawing on to do the loa in Count Zero. Those seemed very masculine, relatively."

From a 2007 interview for Powell's Books.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 1:53 AM on May 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

The hat is where spirituality joins together, in novel articulations, with identity and performance.

You can tell a lot about a man, by how he wears a hat, and what kind of hat he wears. The decline of hat-wearing is a sign of something or other, as is the survival among cis white guys of hat-wearing solely in the form of the prole cap and especially its most recent incarnation, the MAGA hat.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:38 AM on May 24, 2021 [1 favorite]