Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan ...realm. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries.The African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new, local and foreign religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to mold a novel and constantly evolving Kongo Christian worldview. Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.
Early modern central Africa comes to life in an extraordinary
atlas of vivid watercolors and drawings that Italian Capuchin
Franciscans, veterans of Kongo and Angola missions, composed
between 1650 ...and 1750 for the training of future missionaries.
These "practical guides" present the intricacies of the natural,
social, and religious environment of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century west-central Africa and outline the primarily
visual catechization methods the friars devised for the region.
Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola
brings this overlooked visual corpus to public and scholarly
attention.
This beautifully illustrated book includes full-color
reproductions of all the images in the atlas, in conjunction with
rarely seen related material gathered from collections and archives
around the world. Taking a bold new approach to the study of early
modern global interactions, art historian Cécile Fromont
demonstrates how visual creations such as the Capuchin vignettes,
though European in form and crafstmanship, emerged not from a
single perspective but rather from cross-cultural interaction.
Fromont models a fresh way to think about images created across
cultures, highlighting the formative role that cultural encounter
itself played in their conception, execution, and modes of
operation.
Centering Africa and Africans, and with ramifications on four
continents, Fromont's decolonial history profoundly transforms our
understanding of the early modern world. It will be of substantial
interest to specialists in early modern studies, art history, and
religion.
Abstract
In 1730, the Inquisition of Lisbon arrested José Francisco Pereira, a man raised in West Africa and enslaved in Brazil then Portugal, who had learned along his transatlantic journeys the art ...of making amulets known in the eighteenth century Portuguese-speaking world as bolsas de mandinga. Mixing European esoteric material into objects of Afro-Atlantic agency, bolsa-makers such as José Francisco created objects of trustworthy might that brought empowerment and security of body and mind to a diverse clientele. The bolsas, as well as similar empowered objects created in Atlantic Africa reveal the deep and mutually transformative spiritual and material connections that the slave trade engendered between Europeans and Africans in the early modern period. Common concerns produced similar answers, not least newly defined or redefined notions of witchcraft and fetish and, more broadly, conceptions about the nature of power and its multivalent entanglements with the material world.
Charting the origins and significance of the use of two types of specifically coloured cloth in west central Africa, this essay investigates visual, material, and social change in that region during ...the era of the slave trade. White uniforms worn by Christian church leaders and blue and white imported textiles, it argues, are two key examples that reveal how the inhabitants of the closely related regions of Kongo, Angola, and Loango welcomed and managed the novelties that their sustained cross‐cultural relations with Europeans, and engagement in the slave trade, ushered in, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It reveals profound links between religion, power, and the slave trade, and their bearing on central Africa from the early modern period to the eve of the colonial era.
This volume demonstrates how, from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, enslaved and free Africans in the Americas used Catholicism and Christian-derived celebrations as spaces for autonomous ...cultural expression, social organization, and political empowerment. Their appropriation of Catholic-based celebrations calls into question the long-held idea that Africans and their descendants in the diaspora either resignedly accepted Christianity or else transformed its religious rituals into syncretic objects of stealthy resistance.
In cities and on plantations throughout the Americas, men and women of African birth or descent staged mock battles against heathens, elected Christian queens and kings with great pageantry, and gathered in festive rituals to express their devotion to saints. Many of these traditions endure in the twenty-first century. The contributors to this volume draw connections between these Afro-Catholic festivals—observed from North America to South America and the Caribbean—and their precedents in the early modern kingdom of Kongo, one of the main regions of origin of men and women enslaved in the New World. This transatlantic perspective offers a useful counterpoint to the Yoruba focus prevailing in studies of African diasporic religions and reveals how Kongo-infused Catholicism constituted a site for the formation of black Atlantic tradition.
Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas complicates the notion of Christianity as a European tool of domination and enhances our comprehension of the formation and trajectory of black religious culture on the American continent. It will be of great interest to scholars of African diaspora, religion, Christianity, and performance.
In addition to the editor, the contributors include Kevin Dawson, Jeroen Dewulf, Junia Ferreira Furtado, Michael Iyanaga, Dianne M. Stewart, Miguel A. Valerio, and Lisa Voigt.
Breathtaking parades of black kings and their courts enlivened the streets of cities in Europe and the Americas between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Sumptuously dressed queens and ...kings and their resplendent attendants processed to the sound of music, lifted, temporarily, from the grim the life of enslavement or institutionalized inferiority many of them lived in the age of Atlantic slavery. Drawing from a recent analysis of a prominent ritual performance from the central African kingdom of Kongo called sangamento, this article offers a new interpretation of the black kings festivals, beyond their interpretation as carnivalesque pomp emulating and destabilizing European rule. On both shores of the Atlantic, the performances combined African and European regalia and pageantry to express and enact central African collective identity, political power, and social unity. Restaging performances and reshaping ideas honed in the Kongo, enslaved central Africans not only preserved the memory of their region of origins, but also crafted empowered responses to enslavement and the colonial system at large.
ABSTRACT From their king’s decision to embrace Catholicism at the turn of the sixteenth century to the advent of imperial colonialism in the late eighteen hundreds, the men and women of the central ...African kingdom of Kongo creatively mixed, merged, and redefined local and foreign visual forms, religious thought, and political concepts into the novel, coherent, but also constantly evolving worldview of Kongo Christianity. Sartorial practices and regalia in particular showcased the artful conversion of the realm under the impetus of its monarchs and aristocrats. In their clothing and insignia, the kingdom’s elite combined and recast foreign and local, old and new, material and emblems into heralds of Kongo Christian power, wealth, and, eventually history. I propose to use the concept of the space of correlation as a key to analyze these elaborate, and constantly evolving religious, political, and material transformations through an attentive focus on cultural objects such as clothing, hats, swords, and saint figures.
RESUMO Da decisão do rei de abraçar o catolicismo na virada do século XVI até o avanço do colonialismo imperialista do final do século XIX, os homens e mulheres do reino do Congo na África central criativamente misturaram, fundiram e redefiniram formas visuais locais e estrangeiras, pensamento religioso e conceitos políticos numa visão de mundo original, coerente e em constante evolução do cristianismo congo. Práticas de vestimenta e, em especial, insígnias reais demonstram a astuciosa conversão do reino sob o ímpeto de seus monarcas e aristocratas. Através de suas vestimentas e insígnias a elite do reino combinou e remodelou o estrangeiro e o local, o velho e o novo, materiais e emblemas nos arautos de poder, riqueza e, inevitavelmente, história cristã no Congo. Proponho utilizar o conceito de espaço de correlação como elemento-chave para analisar essas elaboradas transformações religiosas, políticas e materiais, em evolução constante, de forma a estabelecer um foco minucioso em objetos culturais tais como indumentária, chapéus, espadas e imagens religiosas.
In seventeenth‐century Cartagena de Indias, a portcity in today's Colombia, enslaved Africans recently disembarked from the Middle Passage faced a Jesuit‐designed multisensory catechesis. The process ...involved listening to translations of the Christian doctrine delivered by African interpreter‐catechists enslaved by the Jesuits, often in conjunction with images. Hell featured prominently in this oral and visual catechesis. This essay analyses the violent confrontation between infernal imagery and survivors of the Middle Passage from regions in and around Kongo and Angola by unfolding a strategically oblique approach to the lacunar, biased records about this critical moment. It examines the vast Atlantic linguistic, spiritual, and visual ramifications of the catechesis to highlight the affective response of enslaved men and women to their captivity and displacement as subjects in history, viewers of works of art, and actors in the dramatic events of enslavement. It brings new, documented, historically situated, and culturally elucidated insights to the study of the transatlantic slave trade.
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