This edited volume of essays offers contributions from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives including history, religion, art history and literature. The essays demonstrate a careful and critical analysis of written documents, language, music, visual sources and festive moments, often shaped by methodological approaches in the field of performance studies. Considered together, these essays make a tremendous contribution to our broad understanding of the global presence of Catholicism. More specifically, the essays provide illuminating analysis of the continuously evolving and influential presence of Catholic and Christian festivals and traditions amongst enslaved and free Africans throughout the black Atlantic world.
Rather than framing Catholicism as an institutional force that was simply imposed from a place of power and used as a mask to cover a hidden system of beliefs, the essays in this volume frame Christian-derived festivals as autonomous and empowering forms of expression and resistance. Exploring case studies in Brazil, Mexico, the United States, the Caribbean and beyond, the essays in this book consider Afro-Catholic festivals in relation to west-central African religious traditions, with a primary focus on the Catholic kingdom of Kongo. This analysis complements and enriches our reading of an existing body of scholarship that focuses on central African spiritual practices and their manifestations in the black Atlantic.
Cécile Fromont's special interest is in the visual culture of the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic world in the early modern period (c. 1500–1800). Her The art of conversion: Christian visual culture in the kingdom of Kongo (Chapel Hill, NC 2017), served to demonstrate her nuanced understanding of Christianity and its impact in specific areas of Africa as well as her thoughtful and innovative use of written and visual sources. While The art of conversion is certainly not a prerequisite to understanding the volume under review, Fromont's first book would certainly be an excellent additional source for readers who wish to deepen their understanding of the tremendously complicated development of Catholic traditions in the Kingdom of Kongo.
The book's introduction, by Fromont and Michael Iyanaga, provides the reader with a concise summary of the unique Kongo Catholic traditions that began to emerge with the kingdom's independent conversion to Catholicism in around 1500. Of particular importance is the sangamento, a mock-fight/ritual that creatively interwove elements drawn from African and European ceremonies and traditions. The introduction also provides an overview of several decades of scholarly debate surrounding the issue of an African contribution to the development of a unique black culture in the Americas; this introduction is extremely helpful for and accessible to readers who are not already deeply involved in the essential debates in the field of African diaspora studies.
The book is divided into four sections. Part i, ‘Ritual Battles from the Kongo Kingdom to the Americas’, examines Christian Kongo precedents for three festivals involving ritual mock battles. Jereon Dewulf's essay explores how Kongo traditions shaped performative rituals of the Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans. Drawing on primary sources from the early to mid-nineteenth century, this essay challenges the notion that ritual performances of the Mardi Gras Indians were primarily influenced by Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows in the 1880s. Kevin Dawson examines how waterscapes shaped life in west-central Africa and Brazil, turning our attention to the Island of Itamaracá in Pernambuco. Dawson examines the Iberian tradition of Moors and Christians and Kongo-Catholic practices used by enslaved people in order to articulate new meanings in the black Atlantic context. Miguel A. Valeria's essay provides a close reading of Bernal Díaz el Castillo's c. 1575 account, The true history of the conquest of new space, focusing specifically on instances of black festival performances.
The work of Lisa Voigt and Junia Ferreira Furtudo is joined together in part ii, ‘America's Black Kings and Diplomatic Representation’. Both of these chapters focus on black kings and festivals in Brazil. Voigt and Furtudo should be commended for their careful use of archival sources; Voigt draws upon literary analysis in her discussion of descriptions of festivals and ceremonies in colonial Brazil, and Furtudo provides a very nuanced reading of a travel account produced by two Brazilian Catholic priests travelling to Dahomey at the end of the eighteenth century.
In part iii, ‘Reconsidering Primary Sources’, Cécile Fromont sheds new light on a well-known lithograph by Johann Moritz Rugendas, providing a critical analysis of this nineteenth-century documentation of black king and queen celebrations. Fromont's rigorous approach allows for a complex and nuanced reading of the image and the congada. Dianne Stuart's chapter scrutinises the concept of syncretism as it is used to explain African diasporic religions, specifically examining the Orisa religion in Trinidad.
Finally, part iv, ‘Aurality and Diasporic Traditions’, consists of just one essay, by Michael Iyanaga, which provides a thoughtful reevaluation of a number of important secondary sources from a comparative perspective in order to examine domestic patron saint festivals in Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia and the Dominican Republic from an ethnographic perspective. This essay also serves as an excellent conclusion to the book, as Iynaga responds quite effectively to the work of scholars discussed in the introduction and throughout the various essays.
Afro-Catholic festivals is essential for gaining an understanding of the complexities of the Catholic tradition in the Atlantic world. The introduction provides a thorough explanation of the major scholarly debates surrounding the study of religious and cultural traditions in the African diaspora, and this is carried through in each of the essays. For this reason, specific knowledge of Atlantic worlds is not a prerequisite for this book. The essays are excellent models for how we might reevaluate existing sources and mine new sources so as to gain a deeper understanding of Afro-Catholic traditions.
