Dana Rush

Fellowship 2014

ARCHIVE

Dana Rush, Ph.D, is a researcher, professor, and curator of African and African diaspora art and material culture. She is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Material Culture at the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands. Previously, she taught African and African diaspora art history and museum studies courses at the University of Illinois.

She has been researching and writing about the religious system of Vodun (Vodun is the traditional religious system in this region organized around a single divine creator and hundreds of spirits) since she first traveled to Bénin and Togo in the 1990s. Since then, her research and writing has been grounded in long-term field research in West Africa (Bénin, Togo) and comparative research in the Americas (Haiti, Brazil, Cuba). Her book, Vodun in Coastal Bénin: Unfinished, Open-Ended, Global (2013), presents Vodun as a cultural synthesis that emphasizes process over product and efficacy over beauty. She has published articles and book chapters in a wide range of journals and anthologies addressing diverse interdisciplinary topics such African-Hinduism, ephemerality and unfinishedness in Vodun aesthetics, and traditional and contemporary Vodun arts. Her most recent Fulbright-sponsored field research (2010-12) sets the foundation for her next project that examines how Vodun material and visual culture along with oral histories serve as critical repositories of slavery remembrance. She is a contributing editor to African Arts and is on the advisory board of Material Religion: the Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief.

In Remembrance of Slavery: Tchamba Vodun in Togo (West Africa)

This project, In Remembrance of Slavery: Tchamba Vodun in Togo, is the first comprehensive study of slavery remembrance in Togo. Working at the intersections of African and Atlantic histories, slave trade studies, oral and spiritual histories, ethnography, music, and arts, the project's academic contributions will impact historiographical and methodological trends in the growing research domain of domestic slavery. The project engages in emerging shifts in studies of the history of African slavery, adds to the growing body of research on domestic slavery, and links domestic and overseas trades particularly in terms of African involvement. It also unearths overlooked dimensions of slavery, especially women’s perspectives and living histories. Methodologically, it introduces alternative approaches. The extensive use of oral histories helps advance the practice and use of oral/video history. The incorporation of visual arts, songs, and Vodun religious performance as repositories of slave trade histories in conjunction with chronicled history is unprecedented.  Spoken, sung, and performed histories along with venerated Vodun objects and paintings will be given space as valid forms historical evidence.