Art of Conversion

Abstract

Between the 16th and the 19th centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity, actively participating in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm on a par with European monarchies. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, this book examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture, traces its development across four centuries marked by war and the Atlantic slave trade, and finally narrates its unraveling as 19th-century European colonialism penetrated Africa. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christian visual material, the book approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries, showing that the African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to shape a novel and evolving Kongo Christian worldview. The book sheds new light on the cross-cultural interactions that created the early modern world, highlighting cultural exchanges while also taking into account the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.

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