Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition

Cécile  Fromont (2013–2014 Fellow)

Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition

Penn State University Press, 2019

Publication Year:  2019

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.