Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora

An ethnographic study of Haiti's Lenten Rara processions — bands that move through the countryside and urban neighborhoods from Ash Wednesday through Holy Week — based on fieldwork in Léogâne, the Artibonite Valley, Port-au-Prince, and Brooklyn from 1991 to 1995. McAlister argues that Rara is simultaneously sacred performance, community organizing, political speech, and military theater, organized as armies with Vodou obligations and performing coded political songs, cemetery work with secret societies, and magical warfare — a system extended into diaspora transmigrant communities in New York City.