Cécile Fromont, "Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition" (Penn State, 2019)

New Books in African American Studies · Jun 9, 2021 · 52m

Edited by Dr. Cécile Fromont, Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (Penn State University Press, 2019), 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…