Jason R. Young. Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic
Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery. (
Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo
and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery derives from Jason R.
Young’s dissertation, which he completed under the guidance of Sterling Stuckey
at the
In a dauntingly sophisticated introduction, Young
rejects the notion that Latin and South American slaves retained a greater
degree of African culture than their North American brethren, arguing that
“blackness is not such a quantity that might be compared and evaluated from one
context to another” (8). Behind this contention is the belief that African
culture in the
Young next analyzes resistance, successfully contending
that religion provided a tool for resistance not only by assaulting the system
of slavery through work slowdowns, theft, the destruction of tools, feigned
illness, or rebellion but also by assailing the very ideological foundations of
the institution. It is in his exploration of ideological resistance that Young is
at his most creative and compelling, as he argues that a foundational element
of the religious resistance to the ideology of slavery was epistemological. As
the master class increasingly depended upon the scientific rationalism of
modernity, slaves nourished an enchanted worldview, replete with permeable
barriers between the living and the dead, ecstatic worship, and elaborate
rituals of conjure.
The narrative begins with
a view of the political and social structure of pre-colonial Kongo where
monarchs in the city of
Baptism was notably
emblematic of the manner in which converts interpreted Christianity through the
terms of traditional Kongolese religious practice, as the sacrament was viewed
as a protection ritual to guard against the dangers of the slave trade. Despite
the invocation of such protective rituals, the slave trade wreaked havoc
throughout Kongo, carrying so many across the ocean and into the Lowcountry of
South Carolina and Georgia. It was here that enslaved Africans “mediated the
faith and its rituals to respond to the immediacy of their lives and the
specificity of their own symbolic and cosmological constructions” (76). Baptism
became less of a protective ritual and more of a connection to the passage
between the temporal world and the spiritual world of the dead.
Slaves eschewed the
worship of their masters as often as possible, preferring to gather in the
praise house for a decidedly different brand of religious expression. Young compellingly
illustrates how the modes of slave worship were constructed to resist the
ideologies of slavery. While slavery demanded unrelenting submission from its
subjects, slave worship emphasized free will and improvisation. When religious
ecstasy seized the slave body, the control and ownership of the master class was
subsumed by that of the divine. Slaves mounted an ideological attack on the
foundations of human bondage by emphasizing a worship of boundless
liberty.
In addition to Christian
practice, Africans on both sides of the
Following the discussion
of conversion, baptism, and conjure, Young concludes with a treatment of death
and funerary ritual. Once again, Young finds resistance in the folk practices
of Lowcountry slaves, as rituals of mourning took on an ecstatic emotional
intensity, allowing slaves to define themselves as more than objects of exploitation.
Ultimately, the afterlife offered the greatest opportunity for retribution
against the master class as slaves constructed a netherworld of righteous punishment.
Rituals of Resistance is not another attempt to show the similarities
between African cultures on both sides of the
Benjamin G. Wright
Professor of Religious Studies