Rituals of Resistance

Rituals of Resistance
by Paul Harvey

Phil has just posted on the new collection Souls of W. E. B. DuBois, edited by our own Ed Blum and Jason Young. As it happens, I was just finally getting to Professor Young's book, published by LSU Press in 2007, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery.

Young's work is part of a larger trend towards placing African American religious history within the larger context of the Atlantic world, or the African Atlantic. The excitement of this scholarship comes from its promise in moving behind stale debates and paradigms (such as the old Frazier versus Herskovits debate, or the "resistance" or "accommodationism" paradigms) by investigating the transmission of religious ideas and practices with geographic, cultural, and chronological specificity. John Thornton's work has been instrumental in this wave of scholarship, as has (from a very different, indeed conflicting, perspective) Michael Gomez's. What is most compelling about this scholarly discussion is placing African ideas of Christianity squarely into the mix that went into the making of the Atlantic religious world, which just gets more complicated and interesting the more it has been investigated in the last generation of scholarship. As Young puts it:

the prior exposure that some Kongolese captives had with Catholicism colored the subsequent encounter that New World slaves had with the mandate of Christian conversion in the Americas, thus complicating the ulimate meaning of Christian conversion. In Kongo, many converts believed that baptism offered a spiritual protection against not only death but also against the very real threat of being taken as a slave . . . others reinterpreted Christian theology to argue that Jesus was Kongolese and that Jerusalem was located in the capital of Kongo.

Here's a description of Young's book, from its webpage:

In Rituals of Resistance Jason R. Young explores the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina during the era of slavery. The choice of these two sites mirrors the historical trajectory of the transatlantic slave trade which, for centuries, transplanted Kongolese captives to the Lowcountry through the ports of Charleston and Savannah. Analyzing the historical exigencies of slavery and the slave trade that sent not only men and women but also cultural meanings, signs, symbols, and patterns across the Atlantic, Young argues that religion operated as a central form of resistance against slavery and the ideological underpinnings that supported it.

Through a series of comparative chapters on Christianity, ritual medicine, burial practices, and transmigration, Young details the manner in which Kongolese people, along with their contemporaries and their progeny who were enslaved in the Americas, utilized religious practices to resist the savagery of the slave trade and slavery itself. When slaves acted outside accepted parameters—in transmigration, spirit possession, ritual internment, and conjure—Young explains, they attacked not only the condition of being a slave, but also the systems of modernity and scientific rationalism that supported slavery. In effect, he argues, slave spirituality played a crucial role in the resocialization of the slave body and behavior away from the oppressions and brutalities of the master class. Young's work expands traditional scholarship on slavery to include both the extensive work done by African historians and current interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies, anthropology, and literature.

Drawing on a wide range of primary sources from both American and African archives, including slave autobiography, folktales, and material culture, Rituals of Resistance offers readers a nuanced understanding of the cultural and religious connections that linked blacks in Africa with their enslaved contemporaries in the Americas. Moreover, Young's groundbreaking work gestures toward broader themes and connections, using the case of the Kongo and the Lowcountry to articulate the development of a much larger African Atlantic space that connected peoples, cultures, languages, and lives on and across the ocean's waters.

New Orleans Voodoo Museum in NY Times, and in Scholarly Perspective

Paul Harvey

Edward Rothstein reviews the New Orleans Voodoo Museum today in the NY Times, and makes a brief reference to Carolyn Morrow Long's biography of Marie Laveau (one of several competing biographies of this part historical/part mythical figure). Rothstein writes of the tiny museum:

It’s voodoo that these gravesite relics reflect. They are called gris-gris: items associated with seekers who wish to change something about their lives or the lives of others. My guide, Jerry Gandolfo, runs the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum in the nearby French Quarter. (His brother began it in 1972.) It is less a museum than two rooms, one consisting mainly of gris-gris along with altars used by contemporary practitioners. It is like an old curiosity shop, dusty, not terribly well cared for, almost startlingly haphazard.

The museum really needs the kind of curatorial intelligence that only emerges when Mr. Gandolfo, smartly stocked with information, associations and anecdotes, begins to speak. But the museum still gets something across about the powers of spirits (“vodu” in the Fon religion of West Africa) and their ability to make use of the lowliest of objects. No gilded artifacts or high-falutin’ pomp here: this is a folk religion in which power seems to flow from the trivial, or the horrifying.

A cool little slide show is here.

Time for me to pay another visit when the Southern Historical Association meets in New Orleans, 2nd weekend in October this year.

Here' the program, and apropos of the topic at hand, I'll paste in here a session on the scholarly study of this subject, scheduled in the Sunday morning slot when many participants will have left perhaps, but surely of interest to many. It features Carolyn Long and the younger scholar Jeffrey Anderson, author of a recent and very helpful study Conjure in African American Society, which I reviewed in the American Historical Review (subscription or J-STOR access required). My review, in brief summary:

Jeffrey E. Anderson provides a solid summation and overview of magical and religio-pharmacological traditions—captured in the single multivalent word "conjure"—in African American history. Conjure, he writes, was a "form of utilitarian, pragmatic spirituality" (p. 79), a composite of beliefs, suspicions, and actions with roots in African, Native American, and Western European cultures. Anderson's coverage of the African roots and European parallels to African American conjure are familiar from other recent works in the field, most notably Yvonne Chireau's Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (2003). By contrast, his stress on Native American influences—including animals from the Underworld and the use of "diviners chiefly concerned ... with foretelling the course of individual lives, finding lost or stolen articles, and most important, diagnosing illness" (p. 66)—is a fresh analysis. As well, Anderson's emphasis of Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean influences on the later evolution of conjuring traditions in the United States distinguishes this work.

Here's the session -- ya'll come. And for god's sake, join the SHA already.

Sunday, October 12: 9:00-11:00 A.M. (Sheraton New Orleans)

56. BEYOND THE VOODOO DOLL

PRESIDING: Charles Joyner, Coastal Carolina University

The Perils of Hoodoo: Scholarly Pitfalls in the Study of African American Supernaturalism
Jeffrey E. Anderson, University of Louisiana, Monroe

Superstition and Supernaturalism in White and Black Southern Folk Culture
Philip Gibbs, Middle Georgia College

Supernaturalism in the Body: Black Pentecostalism in the U.S.
Clarence Hardy, Dartmouth College

The Commercialization of Voodoo and Hoodoo
Carolyn Morrow Long, Smithsonian Institution

Motives and Meanings of Black Christianization in the Colonial and Antebellum Eras
Randolph Ferguson Scully, George Mason University

Voodoo, Women’s Religion, and Social Suffering in New Orleans: New Research on Old Spiritualities
Martha C. Ward, University of New Orleans