"Caribbean Food Cultures" approaches the matter of food from the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, cultural and literary studies. Its strong interdisciplinary focus provides new insights into symbolic and material food practices beyond eating, drinking, cooking, or etiquette. The contributors discuss culinary aesthetics and neo/colonial gazes on the Caribbean in literary documents, audiovisual media, and popular images. They investigate the negotiation of communities and identities through the preparation, consumption, and commodification of "authentic" food. Furthermore, the authors emphasize the influence of underlying socioeconomic power relations for the reinvention of Caribbean and Western identities in the wake of migration and transnationalism. The anthology features contributions by renowned scholars such as Rita De Maeseneer and Fabio Parasecoli who read Hispano-Caribbean literatures and popular culture through the lens of food studies.

Throughout Haitian history-from 17th century colonial Saint-Domingue to 21st century postcolonial Haiti-arguably, the Afro-Haitian religion of Vodou has been represented as an "unsettling faith" and a "cultural paradox," as expressed in various forms and modes of Haitian thought and life including literature, history, law, politics, painting, music, and art. Competing voices and conflicting ideas of Vodou have emerged from each of these cultural symbols and intellectual expressions. The Vodouist discourse has not only pervaded every aspect of the Haitian life and experience, it has defined the Haitian cosmology and worldview. Further, the Vodou faith has had a momentous impact on the evolution of Haitian intellectual, aesthetic, and literary imagination; comparatively, Vodou has shaped Haitian social ethics, sexual and gender identity, and theological discourse such as in the intellectual works and poetic imagination of Jean Price-Mars, Dantes Bellegarde, Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis, etc. Similarly, Vodou has shaped the discourse on the intersections of memory, trauma, history, collective redemption, and Haitian diasporic identity in Haitian women's writings such as in the fiction of Edwidge Danticat, Myriam Chancy, etc. The chapters in this collection tell a story about the dynamics of the Vodou faith and the rich ways Vodou has molded the Haitian narrative and psyche. The contributors of this book examine this constructed narrative from a multicultural voice that engages critically the discipline of ethnomusicology, drama, performance, art, anthropology, ethnography, economics, literature, intellectual history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, religion, and theology. Vodou is also studied from multiple theoretical approaches including queer, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, postcolonial criticism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis.