The objective of this volume was to go beyond the view of Christian (Catholic) elements in African Atlantic world performance traditions as either forcefully imposed and reluctantly accepted by enslaved or disenfranchised Africans or radically transformed into hybrid forms of resistance and empowerment. In order to give more nuanced accounts of certain festive celebrations in the African Americas, the contributors explore and argue for the importance of precedents originating in the west-central African world of the early modern Catholic Kongo kingdom (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) that were adopted, adapted, and transformed to serve as vehicles for “autonomous cultural expression, social organization, and political empowerment” (p. 1). With this as the framing proposition, the authors offer an array of detailed examples of how a distinctive Kongo Christianity helped to shape the cultures and histories of Africans in the Americas. In short, the main argument is that syncretism was already in place in west-central Africa before dispersal across the Atlantic so that Christianity was able to serve as a means/site for African Atlantic religions and world-views. This volume engages the longstanding and on-going debates about “Africanisms” in the America—their sources/origins, the means by which they were formed, and their impacts on cultural and religious formations in the Americas. Looking at both shores (as well as the Iberian Peninsula), and with a focus on west-central Africa (European elements in central Africa and central African elements in the Americas), can deepen and enrich our understandings of the complex cultural worlds that Africans and their descendants made in the Americas. We must always remember that those who were enslaved and carried across the Atlantic may have come empty-handed, that is, stripped of their material possessions, but not empty-headed. They came as social beings, persons embodying and creating culture and history.The book is organized in three parts: Part I, “Ritual Battles from the Kongo Kingdom to the Americas,” considers the Kongo mock battle/celebration tradition that came to be called (in Afro-Portuguese) sangamento. Derived from the Kikongo motion verb ku-sanga referring to agile leaps and dodges, the authors explore the sangamento and its possible presence and impact in a number of American festival contexts.The first essay, Jeroen Dewulf's “Sangamentos on Congo Square?” questions the origins of the Mardi Gras Indians, often linked with the 1884-6 presence of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in New Orleans, and forcefully argues that their roots may have come from martial dances in Congo Square (not unlike a sangamento), and ultimately as an expression of Afro-Iberian folk Catholicism. With this wider historical and geographic frame he traces the multiple strands woven together over time and space (Africa to Americas, 1483-1900) that have contributed to shape the performances of the Black Indians of New Orleans. He begins with early sources on royal martial performances among the Kongo (ku-sanga) that were transformed into a hybrid Afro-Catholic rite termed sangamento. By the sixteenth century, sangamento had incorporated elements of Iberian martial rites celebrating the reconquista in Moros e Christianos (Moors and Christians), performances that were orchestrated by Catholic saintly brotherhoods—all of which traveled across the African Atlantic in the bodies and minds of the enslaved to the Caribbean and ultimately that most Caribbean of American cities, New Orleans. Over time, these Afro-Catholic performances were gradually pushed from such religious rites as Catholic saints’ days to the increasingly secular Carnival, whether to Congo Square or the street performances of Africans in Cuba, Brazil, Uruguay, or Argentina. This meticulous tracing of longstanding and widely dispersed related performance traditions provides a forceful argument for an array of cultural threads that have eventually led to the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans.The second essay, by Kevin Dawson—”Moros e Christianos Ritualized Naval Battles”—considers the 1815 performance by enslaved women and men of a mock naval battle on the Island of Itamaraca in Pernambuco, Brazil, that restaged the Iberian Catholic ritual drama Moros e Christianos along with the “christening of the king of the Moors” (congado/a) and combined both salt and fresh water maritime rites from west-central African traditions to Brazil. I witnessed a similar performance and forced christening ceremony during the Congo Carnival of Portobelo, Panama, a site that could add further weight to the arguments made in this volume.1 But I wonder if there might also be elements of salt and sweet water divinities from other African traditions besides the simbi spirits of Kongo, such as Yemanja and Oxum, from enslaved Yoruba/Nago who would have been arriving in Brazil in ever larger numbers by the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century?The third article, by Miguel Valerio—”A Mexican Sangamento?”—speculates that ladinos (Africans either enslaved or free in the Iberian Peninsula) who were active in Catholic confraternities before coming to New Spain/Mexico may have been responsible for creating a spectacular cavalry of black men and women in mock battle with “heathen” indigenous forces in New Spain in 1539. The author uses a broad, comparative performance approach to Afro-Iberian and Afro-Atlantic celebrations, early sixteenth and seventeenth century sources, and an Afrocentric perspective to illuminate a range of Afro-Christian festive traditions in both Iberia and the Americas. The author highlights the importance of the distinction and differences between enslaved Africans brought directly to Mexico (boçales) and those Christianized Africans coming via Iberia (ladinos) who would have brought their Afro-Christian festive practices with them, ones that included both a martial performance as well as royal ceremonies. Using early sixteenth and seventeenth century sources to document the earliest Afro-Christian festive event in the Americas (New Spain/Mexico), he underscores the agency of the actors (who were paid for such performances), and encourages us to see it as “an African-designed event rather than an act of mimicry” (p. 68) as others have suggested.In Part II, “America's Black Kings and Diplomatic Representation,” Lisa Voigt's chapter “Representing an African King in Brazil” explores how central Africans used congadas (coronation festivals of African royalty in Brazil) to represent themselves in ways that were positive and productive for their interests. The author, invoking performance scholar Diana Taylor's approach of combining both repertoire (bodily practice) and archive (visual/textual sources) to reveal past festival performances, focuses on written charters (compromissos of Black Catholic brotherhoods) and visual sources (like the lithographs of the Dutch artist Rugendas who represented congadas) and how Africans used them to advance their own interests and agendas. She goes on to demonstrate how Afro-Brazilians understood and used the power of the compromissos (texts celebrating their performances), and the periodic diplomatic visits of African ambassadors to Brazil from various African kingdoms (Kongo, Soyo, Dahomey and others), to shape their own self-representations, actions, and agency.Junia Ferreira Furtado's “Black Ceremonies in Perspective: Brazil and Dahomey in the Eighteenth Century” tells the story of two Catholic priests, born and raised in predominantly Afro-Brazilian communities (one was definitely a mulatto and the other may have been), who were sent on a mission to convert the kingdom of Dahomey to Catholicism as well as to record their impressions of the Dahomean Kingdom in the late eighteenth century for the king of Portugal in a manuscript entitled “Viagem de Africa em o Reino de Dahomé.” The antipathy the priests expressed in their descriptions of Africa and Dahomey demonstrate the impact of Lusophone-Brazilian Catholic culture on them and their mission. The chapter reveals how the enculturation of the priests determined their views of Africa and Dahomey as a site of barbarism and idolatry. Despite their own personal connection to African ancestry, their descriptions are not much different from those of white Brazilian or Portuguese travelers to Africa, or European travelers to Brazil, who as Mary Karasch pointedly states were unable to “avoid ethnocentric criticisms or color prejudices” (p. 133).In Part III, “Reconsidering Primary Sources,” Cécile Fromont's chapter “Envisioning Brazil's Afro-Christian Congados” offers a close visual analysis of the creation, contents, and composition of one of the most well-known lithographs by the Dutch artist Johann Moritz Rugendas of a congada/o in nineteenth century Brazil entitled “Feast of Saint Rosaly, Patroness of the Blacks” (1835), in order to better understand how Afro-Brazilian women and men use the congada/o to advance their socio-religious and political objectives. The congada/o incorporated diverse European and African elements (musical instruments, regalia of dress and feathers, etc.) as she argues persuasively the “often elusive process of cumulative creation and transformation at the core of the African collective experience in the Americas” (p. 127). A clearer, larger rendering of the Rugendas lithograph, as well as the other figures and plates (or online links to see and study them better), would have been helpful to allow a close visual analysis along with the text. This reviewer resorted to a magnifying glass and iPhone-enlargement to see and assess the visual evidence cited.Dianne M. Stewart, in “The Orisa House that Afro-Catholics Built,” argues that academic theories about African and European religious syncretism are reductionist because they ignore the possibilities of trans/intra-African inspirations taking precedence over others. She provides a provocative and compelling example from the history of the Shango-Orisa religion in nineteenth century Trinidad when large numbers of liberated Yoruba who were carried to the island between 1840-1860 chose to align their devotional practices with those of ex-enslaved Afro-Creole Catholics and their celebrations of emancipation on August 1. Stewart's study is thus another example of a more nuanced and complexed understanding of the circumstances shaping African agency in the Americas that included other African descendant communities in providing the tactics and strategies for survival and assertion.2Beginning Part IV on “Aurality and Diasporic Traditions” is Michael Iyanaga's “On Hearing Africas in the Americas,” a much-needed analysis of the African musical presence in the Americas, specifically those sounds that have been a part of domestic celebrations for Catholic saints from the beginning. As a sensiotian,3 I was very pleased to see this contribution and its exploration of the history and impact of sound/music in shaping culture and religious practice. This turn to bodily knowledge and cultural sense-abilities and away from texts that have either erased or distorted the historical record of Africans in the Americas is most welcome. Bodily social memory and the multisensorial performance of culture are important and valuable concepts in this volume.Here are some other thoughts about this inspiring volume. I like the “further reading” (and “listening” for Iyanaga's offering) at the end of each chapter, a welcome feature that highlights the need for multiple perspectives and continuing deep and broad scholarship to enrich and enliven ongoing debates about Africanisms in the Americas, and Europeanisms in Africa. I also like that authors include one “shore” that often gets forgotten in these Afro-Atlantic discussions: the Mediterranean world, especially the Iberian Peninsula where the experiences of Africans (whether enslaved or free) since the medieval and early modern eras may have helped to shape Black Atlantic cultures.A map showing the extent and influence of the Catholic kingdom of Kongo in the years covered by this book would have been helpful, especially in characterizing the nature of that religious influence over time and space, and among different Bantu ethnicities. Yes, “central” Africans may have constituted 45% of all enslaved between the sixteenth amd nineteenth centuries, but what were their exact origins and relationship to the Kongo Catholic kingdom? If they were vassals or enemies of the Kongo kingdom, would any Catholic elements have been part of their worldview? Is west-central Africa as homogenous as claimed by Slenes and Vansina (p. 8)? Yes, I agree that more scholarly attention has been paid to peoples of west Africa/Guinea Coast due to multiple factors (the impact of academic players such as Herskovits, Ortiz, Cabrera, Bascom, Rodrigues, Bastide, and Verger with his focus on Bahia rather than Rio, as well as greater textual sources about the late, massive influx of west Africans to Brazil, Cuba and the Caribbean). This volume usefully shifts the focus to west-central Africa and Christianity despite questions that linger about this “experiential common ground” (p. 11). Continuing research and greater specificity may provide some answers.The importance of this edited volume lies in its interrogation of past scholarship on the various cultural beliefs and bodily practices that make up the vast and varied cultural worlds of the Black Atlantic. Its focus on the presence and impact of an Afro-Catholic faith begun in the kingdom of Kongo (and in the Afro-Iberian world) is a potent thread to explore as we seek to unravel the sources, the multiplicity of histories, forces, and experiences of African peoples as they fought to survive and thrive in a world not of their choosing. Yet thrive they did against all odds and the world is richer for it.