Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery Paperback - 2011

From the rear cover

"A persuasive and fluid interpretation of slave culture, demonstrating the centrality of African-derived practices without presuming a static nature of socio-cultural development on either side of the Atlantic." -- Journal of Social History

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. 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.

Drawing on a wide range of sources from the Americas, Europe, and Africa, including archives, 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.

"A thoughtful, carefully constructed book in which specialists in American cultural history will find food for thought." -- Journal of Southern History

"An important addition to the historiography of the cultural world of enslaved Africans in North America." -- Journal of African American History

Jason R. Young is associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Buffalo.