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Houngan Collin Edouard
Houngan Collin Edouard is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology with certifications in ethnicity, race, and migration, and college teaching preparation at Yale University. He specializes in vocality, ritual
sounds, and spirit mobility within Haitian Vodou ceremonies. He was awarded the 2023 Karen McCarthy Brown Award for his research on breath and the body in Vodou and received the 2024 Emerging Scholars Award from the Haitian Studies Association. With over a decade of teaching experience, he has introduced innovative courses, such as "Music of the Global South," at Bridgeport University. His teaching, in which he asks his students to consider mobility and vocality beyond Eurocentric frameworks. His decolonized pedagogy won him the 2024 Excellence in Teaching Award.
He serves on the boards of PBKNY and Kosanba, organizations dedicated to enhancing scholarly engagement for students and professionals both within and beyond the academy. He holds an M.Mus from the University of Cambridge and an M.A in music and music education from Teachers College, Columbia University. He is a priest in the Haitian Vodou tradition and a proud member of Sosyete Nago.
Their Presentation: Sacred Song, and Embodied Archives of Resistance
This paper examines Vodou vocality and vibration as embodied technologies of resistance and worldmaking within Haitian Vodou. Drawing on ethnographic research with practitioners, ritual
specialists, and sound archives, it foregrounds the voice, breath, rhythm, and percussive utterance as epistemic forces that exceed language and textuality. In Vodou ceremonial contexts, vocal sounds,
chants, cries, seemingly unintelligible utterances, call-and-answer patterns, and breath-inflected exhalations operate not merely as expressive media but as vibrational acts that reorganize space, time, and relationality. These sonic practices call lwa yo (Vodou spirits), activate ancestral memory, and
recalibrate the body toward balance, producing what practitioners describe as alignment rather than belief.
By centering the animation of vocality in Vodou, this paper examines how vocal performances function within the liturgical cycle, their role in sustaining cultural memory, and their capacity to mobilize both spiritual power and social solidarity. It examines instances of divine interaction as
conveyed through vocal sonorities and the responses elicited from listeners. It highlights the expertise of Vodou priests, who provide insight into the significance of voice and the interpretations of performances of Vodou liturgical songs. Situating Vodou vocality within Black Atlantic histories of enslavement, colonial violence, and epistemic suppression, the paper argues that vibration functions as a counter-archive: a mode of transmission that resists capture by colonial grammars and survives
through repetition, resonance, and corporeal attunement. These vocal practices transcend expression; they function as vibrational strategies that regulate energy, mediate the presence of spirits, and promote collective equilibrium in situations marked by social precarity. Vocal vibration becomes a practice of fugitivity, enabling practitioners to sustain worlds that colonial modernity sought to silence or eradicate. Through sustained attention to tone color, iteration, and resonance, the paper theorizes Vodou sound as a material force that shapes social life and African cosmology alike.