The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)
Cecile Fromont (Author)
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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 Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries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.
Kongo across the Waters
(catalogue for (still) travelling exhibition in University Art Galleries. Now in Princeton)
Susan Cooksey (Editor), Robin Poynor (Editor), Hein Vanhee (Editor)
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“A powerful statement through both word and image of how individuals of African descent have negotiated African cultural practices, whether through remembrance or rediscovery, as strategies for their physical and psychological health.”—Jean Borgatti, Boston University
“Uses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding Kongo culture in Africa and its transformation in North America. Valuable in its scope and coverage, this is an important collection of studies from the leading scholars on Kongo.”—Mariana Candido, author of An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World
The Kingdom of Kongo, situated in today’s Angola and the DRC, had already developed a sophisticated artistic and cultural life by the time the Portuguese arrived in 1483. Europeans soon admired and collected particular forms of Kongo art while Kongo elites converted to Christianity and started communicating with European courts through writing.
With the development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, many less fortunate Kongolese were transported to the New World. From the Chesapeake Bay to New Orleans, Kongo peoples left their imprint on the life, art, and cultures of the African diaspora. Only recently have scholars begun to fully understand the extent of this influence.
Immersing readers in Kongo history and culture, the contributors to Kongo across the Waters investigate how an African culture with considerable historical depth evolved over five centuries in West Central Africa and also contributed significantly to the process of culture formation in communities of enslaved Africans and descendants of enslaved Africans in North America. By looking at art from Kongo and from African American communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kongo across the Waters brings to light historic links between West Central Africa and North America.
This volume allows leading scholars of Kongo history, anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and art to examine the history of Kongo peoples from the fifteenth century through today. These essays probe the historical interactions between the Kongolese and the Atlantic world, Kongo presence and influence in the United States, and Kongo inspired artistic expression in contemporary art.
Visually and textually appealing, Kongo across the Waters is an overdue and valuable contribution to the literature on Africa’s history and its Atlantic connections.
Congo: The Epic History of a People Paperback (published in February)
David Van Reybrouck (Author)
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From the beginnings of the slave trade through colonization, the struggle for independence, Mobutu’s brutal three decades of rule, and the civil war that has raged from 1996 to the present day, Congo: The Epic History of a People traces the history of one of the most devastated nations in the world. Esteemed scholar David Van Reybrouck balances hundreds of interviews with a diverse range of Congolese with meticulous historical research to construct a multidimensional portrait of a nation and its people.
Epic in scope yet eminently readable, both penetrating and deeply moving, Congo—a finalist for the Cundill Prize—takes a deeply humane approach to political history, focusing squarely on the Congolese perspective, and returns a nation’s history to its people.