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 Jeroen Dewulf, Kevin Dawson, Miguel Valerio, Lisa Voight, Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Dianne Stewart, and Michael Iyanaga.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Kongo Christianity, Festive Performances, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition
Cécile Fromont and Michael Iyanaga
Part 1 Ritual Battles from the Kongo Kingdom to the Americas
1. Sangamentos on Congo Square? Kongolese Warriors, Brotherhood Kings, and Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans
Jeroen Dewulf
2. Moros e Christianos Ritualized Naval Battles: Baptizing American Waters with African Spiritual Meaning
Kevin Dawson
3. A Mexican Sangamento? The First Afro-Christian Performance in the Americas
Miguel A. Valerio
Part 2 America’s Black Kings and Diplomatic Representation
4. Representing an African King in Brazil
Lisa Voigt
5. Black Ceremonies in Perspective: Brazil and Dahomey in the Eighteenth Century
Junia Ferreira Furtado
Part 3 Reconsidering Primary Sources
6. Envisioning Brazil’s Afro-Christian Congados: The Black King and Queen Festival Lithograph of Johann Moritz Rugendas
Cécile Fromont
7. The Orisa House That Afro-Catholics Built: Africana Antecedents to Yoruba Religious Formation in Trinidad
Dianne M. Stewart
Part 4 Aurality and Diasporic Traditions
8. On Hearing Africas in the Americas: Domestic Celebrations for Catholic Saints as Afro-Diasporic Religious Tradition
Michael Iyanaga
List of Contributors
Index
“This remarkable set of essays and their accompanying images bring to life the dynamic interactions of central Africa and the Americas as expressed in music, dance, artistic representation, and spirituality. It does not resolve the great debate over African continuities versus creole creativity, but it enriches and enlivens it and makes it fundamental to an understanding of the Atlantic world.”
—Stuart B. Schwartz, author of All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World
