The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo

by Cécile Fromont

Overview

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 Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469618722
Publisher:	Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
Publication date:	12/19/2014
Series:	Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Cecile Fromont is associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Swords, crosses, caps, red sashes, pendants, and staffs whirled across the sacred landscape of early Kongo in celebration and service of a new Christianity. This book masterfully depicts the blended visual and material world that elite Kongolese created as they shaped their encounter with Catholic Europe and forged a place for themselves in a global Christendom. Kongo Christianity appears here for the first time as a highly innovative, aesthetic practice that rewove connections between life and death, king and people, kingdom and world.—Catherine A. Molineux, Vanderbilt University

Editorial Reviews

An indispensable look at one site of African Christianity before the advance of colonialism.—Christianity Today



A valuable reference work for anyone interested in religious, Christian, and precolonial African art and material culture.—Catholic Historical Review



Meticulously researched, beautifully written, and lavishly illustrated, The Art of Conversion is one of the best books ever published about Central African religious history.—Journal of Interdisciplinary History



Fromont's study is a model of careful scholarship wedded to a well-crafted argument....This book is very likely to remain the starting point for any study of Kongo Christian art, and an important contribution to the understanding of its Christian history.—Social Sciences and Missions



An impressive, ground-breaking work.—ARLIS/NA Reviews



A monumental contribution to scholarship on Kongo Christianity as well as cultural change in the Atlantic world more broadly. She challenges historians to think more deeply about the way in which history can defy easy categorization as continuity or change. . . . Her beautiful prose and evocative use of language powerfully re-create the multisensory rituals of Kongo Christianity. Perhaps most important, Fromont reminds us that Africans were always active participants in their history, the legacy of which resonates across the Atlantic world today.—William and Mary Quarterly



Provides relevant information to the conversion of the Kongo Kingdom to Christianity by providing numerous visual sources to support her argument. . . . Provides previously untapped sources to bring forward a new theory on the conversion of the Kongo and the changes associated with the kingdom's new religion.—Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians



Beautifully produced and accessibly priced edition will reward the attentions of lay connoisseurs as well as of scholars in all the academic disciplines engaging Africa's past.—African Studies Review



A detailed account of how the visual arts were instrumental in [the Kingdom of Kongo.]—Burlington Magazine

From the Publisher