U.S. American literary and creative artists perform the work of developing a discursive response to two critical moments in Haitian history: the Revolution (1791-1804) and the U.S. Marine Occupation (1915 to 1934), inspiring imaginations and imaginary concepts. Revolutionary images of Toussaint Louverture proliferated beyond the boundaries of Haiti illuminating the complicity of colonial powers in maintaining notions of a particularized racial discourse. Frank J. Webb, a free black Philadelphian, engages a scathing critique of Thomas Carlyle’s sage prose “On the Negro Question” (1849) through the fictional depiction of a painted image of Louverture in Webb’s novel The Garies and their Friends (1857). Travel writing and ethnographies of the Occupation provide platforms for new forms of artistic production involving Vodou. Following James Weldon Johnson’s critique of U.S. policy (1920), others members of the Harlem Renaissance provide a counter narrative that reengages particular U.S. readers with Haiti’s problematic Revolution through the visual and literary lens of the Occupation experience. The pseudo journalism of William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) serves as the poto mitan (center point) around which other creative works produced after the Occupation appear. Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maya Deren followed in Seabrook’s wake. Literature, performances, and film, as well as complementary ethnographic records for each follow from Dunham (Dances of Haiti, 1983), Hurston (Tell My Horse, 1938), and Deren (Divine Horsemen, 1953). The artistic production of these significant cultural producers may better represent their experience of fieldwork in Haiti following the Occupation. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Dunham’s exposure of Haitian dances across the world stage, and Deren’s experimental films better capture the reciprocal effect of the ethnographic process on each in their continued presentation to contemporary audiences. Literature directly related to their production appears later in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Arthur Flowers’s Another Good Loving Blues (1993), Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), and Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2005). These productive literatures and art forms actively engage in creating the transnational ideal of diaspora as we understand it today. All dance delicately with spirit.

Arrivé en Haïti avec les Noirs d'Afrique aux 15e et 16e siècles, le vodou est depuis ce temps un élément de la culture haïtienne. Il y a aujourd'hui une coexistence des catholiques, des protestants avec les vodouisants d'où le problème de syncrétisme qui caractérise le vodou. Le silence entretenu à son sujet, dans divers milieux et pour différentes raisons, renforce les préjugés vieux de plusieurs siècles et rend difficile l'évangélisation. Évangéliser la personne vodouisante suppose de bien connaître sa perception de Dieu et les valeurs véhiculées par le vodou. Un sondage auprès des jeunes et d'adultes a enrichi mes connaissances sur le vodou et les moyens d'une évangélisation en Haïti. C'est à partir d'une catéchèse respectueuse des personnes vodouisantes et dans un dialogue oeecuménique [i.e. oecuménique], que les témoins-catéchètes pourront former des personnes capables de s'engager à suivre l'exemple du Christ dans la pratique et l'annonce de la Bonne Nouvelle aujourd'hui.

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There will be no life without water on Earth. Humans influence their surroundings more and more. There is less of drinking water every day. In a few years, absence of drinking water will be a big global problem. Therefore, we should learn how to manage with sources which we have. Especially, we should try to minimalize our influence on environment. This thesis is focused on problems with rainwater in urban area. The first theoretical part of this work is devoted to legislation in the field and possibilities of using rainwater. The practical part includes design of management of rainwater in office complex in Prague. In this second part is several variants which could be realized on this location.

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The purpose of this thesis was to examine the choice patterns that lead to conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism and the role of Vodou after conversion. This study highlights disappointment with the church as the leading cause of conversion in Haiti. Other causes significant to the study were examined. In illness and healing lie the controversies of religious conversion in Haiti. The only way to cure Satanic Illness is by resorting to magic. However, conversion to Protestantism means rejection of Vodou and all of its practice. A secondary purpose is to determine the role of Vodou after conversion. A total of 100 participants between the ages of 18 to 44 were included in this study. Seven percent (7%) converted for economic reasons, 43% selected disappointment with the church, 17% community/environment encounter, 13% sickness/near death experience, 2% economic and disappointment, 7% community/environment encounter and disappointment with the church, 9% disappointment sickness and near death experience, 1% economic and sickness near death experience, 1% economic and community/environment encounter. Findings suggest that Vodou is deeply rooted in Haitian identity, though all Haitians may not practice Vodou; but there are characteristics in the Haitian society that suggest that Haitians are Vodouisant. For the conversion process to be successful in Haiti it has to deeply acknowledged Vodou, the religion practiced by the masses in Haiti.

My dissertation titled "Mambos, Priestesses, and Goddesses: Spiritual Healing Through Vodou in Black Women's Narratives of Haiti and New Orleans" reclaims the practice of Vodou as an integral African spiritual tradition through fiction by black women writers. I discuss how the examination of Vodou necessitates the revision of colonial history, serves as an impetus for reevaluating the literary representation of the black female migrant subject, and gives voice to communities silenced by systemic oppression. I parallel novels by contemporary women writers such as Erna Brodber, Jewell Parker Rhodes and Edwidge Danticat with Zora Neale Hurston's ethnographic research in the early twentieth century in order to examine how Vodou is utilized as a literary trope that challenges racist, stereotypical representations of African spirituality in American popular culture. It is also an examination of the shared socio-cultural history between Haiti and New Orleans that coincides with political and environmental changes. Although Vodou has been disparaged as primitive magic, my work demonstrates its profound social, cultural, and political significance; and its important transformations from a nineteenth-century practice to a twenty-first century strategy of survival.

This dissertation explores the ways that Haitian Vodouisants are actively (re)working Vodou into a diasporic and transnational faith that can speak to localization of both homeland and new land. Immigrant communities are pushed and pulled between homogenizing frames of American religiosity and internal debates and dialogs that may fracture them in new, unique ways. The free market of religions in a disestablishment context such as America gives faith communities the ability to claim equal positioning but also opens doors to religious shoppers and converts. Vodouisants draw upon heritage identities, localization, and networks to make claims of belonging and power. Haitian- ness and blackness are identities of belonging that white initiates cannot claim despite redrawing moral geographies. Initiates are made into inwardly facing communities through the educational as if of ritual, creating possibilities for non-Haitians to belong at least marginally. Redrawing these moral geographies provides a way to construct diasporic faith communities disconnected from the sacred spaces of the homeland. However, redrawing boundaries also means building bridges to diasporic realities and localizations. For Vodouisants in Boston, this means plugging into the progressive narratives of feminism and LGBTQ equality using particular presentations of Vodou mythology and practice. Presentations at universities and work with academics help legitimize not only Vodou but also this diasporic focus. Legitimization in local Boston contexts may aid in claims-making towards belonging to larger American forms of religion, but it also creates problems with homeland identities. Creative accommodations of practice, identity, and narrative building may allow Vodouisants the ability to claim belonging in larger religiosities but at the same time threaten reputations and Haiti focused claims-making of traditionalism. This case study provides insight into what will be a longer and broader process of Vodou developing as an American religion.