Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition
- ISBN-10
- 0271084340
- ISBN-13
- 9780271084343
- Category
- Religion
- Pages
- 224
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2019-05-17
- Publisher
- Penn State Press
- Author
- Cécile Fromont
Description
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.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2019-05-17
- 217 pages
- Ebook
- Penn State Press
Similar books
-
Black Catholic Studies Reader: History and Theology
By David J. EndresHistory and Theology David J. Endres. 2004 March 29 Edward P. Jones (1950–) ... 2007 The Black Catholic Theological Symposium begins publication of the Journal of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium. 2008 July Teresita Weind, ...
-
Spirit on the Move: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora
By Elizabeth A. Pritchard, Judith Casselberrywhat they saw as the special power of Black voices, they did so through a narrative of collective suffering and ... Here is Priscilla's commentary on the Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the US slave narrative by Harriet Jacobs, ...
-
Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola
By Cécile FromontThis 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.
-
Sovereign Joy
By Miguel ValerioValerio, Miguel A. “Black Confraternity Members Performing Afro-Christian Identity in a Renaissance Festival in Mexico City in ... In Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic ...
-
Transnational Spanish Studies
By Catherine Davies, Rory O'Bryenreconfigured salons in Spain as 'spaces of artistic hybridisation' (y Carmen se fue, p. ... 20.1 (2008), 79–100; Michael Christoforidis and Elizabeth Kertesz, Carmen and the Staging of Spain: Recasting Bizet's Opera in the Belle Epoque ...
-
Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain
By Nicholas R. JonesRadical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain Nicholas R. Jones ... Much gratitude to Amyrose McCue Gill and Lisa Regan of TextFormations for their outstanding work on the index as well as the Museu Coleção Berardo ...
-
Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century
By Joseph M. H. ClarkPablo Gómez has argued that African and Afro-descended practitioners did taxonomize Caribbean spaces as distinct from those of mainland centers. He attributes this largely to the social dynamics of the Caribbean itself, ...
-
Hydrocriticism and Colonialism in Latin America: Water Marks
By Mabel MorañaIt is my hope that readers will appreciate and benefit from the diversity of critical approaches presented in this book, ... struggles around citizenship, settler hydrologies, and hydrocosmologies” (Dockside Reading 16). 6.
-
Cofradías Afrohispánicas: Celebración, resistencia furtiva y transformación cultural
By Manuel Apodaca Valdez... le decía que quería ser poeta, pero no un poeta negro, lo cual significaba para él: “quiero escribir como un poeta blanco” o, peor aún, “quiero ser un blanco”.57 Es el mismo dilema que expone Fanon, en Piel negra máscaras blancas.
-
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898)
By Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Santa AriasWashington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Leibsohn, Dana, and Carolyn Dean. 2003. “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America.” Colonial Latin American Review 12 (1): 5–35 ...