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This course will examine the various ways voodoo, as the Unknown, has been represented, misrepresented, recuperated, and interpreted in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution from the early nineteenth century to the present day. While historians have debunked the role of voodoo in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, the literary representation of the slaves in captivity is often associated with the will to liberation enacted in the secret practice of voodoo on the plantation. The history of voodoo in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) is intertwined with the history of colonial subversion, ancestral medicine, and the physical resistance of the enslaved people. Yet the most defining event in the armed uprising by the enslaved, the ceremony of Bois Caiman (August 14, 1791) still divides historians, novelists, and anthropologists. Where history and anthropology seem to flounder in trying to capture the mystery of such ceremony, literature soars majestically, maintaining the mystery by using the freedom of the imagination as its sole support. Might the transmission of voodoo during the colonial period, be understood as the historical mode of preservation of an ancestral secret practice that can only be transmitted through oral tradition and rituals, which may have been lost in the attempt to produce written translations ? Readings in French and English may include works by Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Marie Chauvet, Edwidge Danticat, René Depestre, Zora Neale Hurston, Frédéric Marcelin, Alfred Métraux, Toni Morisson, Jacques Roumain, Simone Schwarz-Bart, William Seabrook, Derek Walcott, Richard Wright, to be supplemented by films, an art exhibit, music, and cultural demonstrations of voodoo. Course taught in French. Discussion in French and English Cross-listed with Humanities Center