Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (review)

An expertly researched and fascinating historical study of "cultural recuperation" and "cultural generation"(p. 18), Rituals of Resistance is a major contribution to our understanding of African Atlantic religion. Carefully discussing the Kongo kingdom as it was fracturing under the violence of the transatlantic slave trade and craftily mining a wide range of primary sources in numerous languages, Jason Young paints a compelling portrait of Kongolese "traditional" religion and the various Kongolese receptions of Catholicism beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, which provided thousands of enslaved West Central Africans with "a certain vocabulary of ritual expression. "Young persuasively argues that this vocabulary was a taproot of slave culture in the Lowcountry (eastern South Carolina and eastern Georgia) during the slave era, the antebellum period, and beyond, as it provided the means by which African American religion there took shape on its own terms and represented "a central form of resistance not only against the system of slavery but also against the very ideological underpinnings that supported slavery in the first place" (p. 11).

Following an introduction that situates Young in an impressive lineage of classical and contemporary scholars of African Atlantic culture (e.g., Melville J. Herskovits, Sterling Stuckey [Young's mentor], Sidney Mintz, Richard Price, James H. Sweet, et al.), and a chapter effectively contextualizing the presence of Kongolese slaves in the American South, the body of this book consists of three chapter-length case studies that illustrate the "recuperation" and "generation" of Kongolese religion in the Lowcountry. The first case study is preceded by a splendid depiction of religion in the Kongo Kingdom from the late-fifteenth to the early-eighteenth century, the period in which Catholicism was adopted by many Kongolese. Here Young asserts that John Thornton's earlier claims about the "authenticity" of Kongolese Catholicism are overstated; that Catholicism in Kongo took "at least five different forms" (p. 44), some of which were marginal at best. In this case study,Young explains the nature and function of Kongolese water spirits (simbi, bisimbi pl.) and of the powerful appeal of the Catholic sacrament of baptism to the Kongolese not as a means of salvation in the Catholic soteriological sense but "as a means of protection from evil spirits" (p. 53). How their simbi spirituality and prior appropriated/ indigenized notions of Catholic baptism in Kongo deeply informed the perception of thousands of enslaved Africans of baptism in the Protestant experience in America is discussed masterfully in the second half of this long chapter.

The other two case studies follow transatlantic suit in demonstrating the influence of Kongolese minkisi ("ritual object[s] invested with otherworldly power" [p. 110]) on conjure culture among African Americans in the Lowcountry and, respectively, the influence of Kongolese burial traditions and ancestral spirituality on black funerary traditions and perceptions of death, dying, and rebirth among African descended peoples in antebellum America. These case studies are, too, very effectively developed and supportively woven into Young's thesis about resistance in the "African Atlantic Religious Complex."

Although some readers might regret that certain key terms such as conversion, ritual, performance, religion, and Western do not receive anything like the careful and sophisticated treatment that Young devotes to culture, I found myself transfixed by the powerful and amazing stories that Young has assembled in demonstrating that "(o)n both sides of the Atlantic the faithful proved adept at resolving and amending Christian doctrine and dogma in line with their own cosmological conceptions and with the immediacy of their own condition"(p. 44). In doing so, the faithful made an indelible contribution to resistance against white supremacy.