Introduction: Kongo Christianity, Festive Performances, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yazar:

Cécile Fromont; Michael Iyanaga

Yayın yılı:

2019

Yayıncı:

Penn State University Press

Dil:

en

Lifting a veil on the secret origins of New Orleans's Mardi Gras Indians, seeing Brazilian Catholic songs anew as an expression of Afro-diasporic devotion, uncovering the deep Afro-Catholic roots of Caribbean Orisa religion and rituals, and analyzing the significance of black kings and queens feted in the Americas and their various forms of representations, the chapters gathered in this volume explore the role that Christianity and its festive traditions have played in the making of black Atlantic cultures since the era of the slave trade.Their arguments move beyond analyses of African diasporic religious traditions that consider their Christian dimensions as inherently exogenous, imposed elements that enslaved or disenfranchised populations of African origins or descent either resignedly accepted or else eventually transformed into syncretic objects of stealthy resistance and identity formation.Instead, authors in this volume draw transatlantic connections between festive traditions from North to South America and the Caribbean and precedents chiefly in the early modern Catholic kingdom of Kongo, an influential polity of west-central Africa and one of the main regions of origin of men and women enslaved in the Americas.This background, they argue, reveals how enslaved and free Africans, and later their descendants, often used Christianity and Christianderived celebrations as physical and mental spaces for autonomous cultural expression, social organization, and political …

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