The 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the British North American colonies prompted many initiatives to reframe US national history around slavery and the role of African Americans, most notably The 1619 Project of The New York Times. Jeroen Dewulf’s excellent book, The Pinkster King and King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves, in some ways anticipated these efforts by retelling one dimension of the “forgotten history” of enslaved Africans: the celebration of Pinkster (Pentecost) by African Americans in the areas that had once been part of the Dutch colony of New Netherland (New York and New Jersey).
Besides his focus on this particular community and geography, Dewulf’s contributions to these efforts to re-center the Black experience in US history stand out for two main reasons. First, he uncovers an unexpected source of Black agency and identity, since public, religious festivals in colonial and slave-owning societies are usually considered to be an effective means of cultural domination and assimilation, or at most a “safety valve” for subaltern groups. Dewulf, instead, makes the case that the festivals meant something different to slaveholders and to the enslaved, and that a focus on the latter—in particular, on the brotherhoods that organized the celebrations—reveals the “assertive participation of the African American community in the public sphere” (10). Second, Dewulf bases this argument on a comparative, multilingual approach that looks beyond the Anglophone history and culture of what would become the US. This approach is evident not only in his focus on areas of Dutch colonization, but also in his comparison with festivals in other areas of the African diaspora, particularly those of Iberian colonization.
It is at the intersection of these two novel approaches that the book’s thesis rests: that the roots of African-American Pinkster celebrations are to be found in the African regions that had been in contact with Iberian Catholicism since the sixteenth century. While Dewulf is not the only one to argue for the African origins of Pinkster celebrations, his attention to this broader geographic and historical context enables him to make better-substantiated claims about its sociological function, particularly the way these festivals evince strategies of what he calls “cooperative resistance,” or negotiation tactics “aimed to secure and gradually expand a set of minimal rights and human dignity in exchange for loyalty and commitment” (11).
The book makes this argument over six well-constructed chapters. The first chapter, “Celebrating Pinkster as a Dutch Tradition,” introduces the Dutch celebration of Pinkster in the Netherlands and New Netherland. The second, “Celebrating Pinskter as an African American Tradition,” shifts to how the African-American community celebrated Pinkster in New York and New Jersey. While the first reference to Black participation dates to 1786, Dewulf mostly relies on two lengthy descriptions in early nineteenth-century newspapers, as well as on accounts in diaries, memoirs, novels, and histories. Chapter 3, “In Search of the Pinkster King,” investigates the different theories about the origins of African-American Pinkster celebrations by comparing them with festivals elsewhere in the Americas, which similarly include the election and procession of Black kings—who, importantly, are not the subject of carnivalesque mockery but are treated with respect.
The fourth chapter, “Slave Kings and Black Brotherhoods in the Atlantic World,” goes to the heart of the argument by explaining the rise (in Portugal, Africa, and Latin America) of Afro-Iberian Catholic brotherhoods as a way to explain the origins of African American Pinkster celebrations. Chapter 5, “The Pinkster King as Leader of a Brotherhood,” uses that revised origin story to show how Pinkster festivals in New Netherland served not only as sites of cultural syncretism but also as venues for negotiation between slaveowners and the enslaved. Finally, Chapter 6, “The Demise and Legacy of the Pinkster Festival,” explains the circumstances surrounding the prohibition of the Pinkster festival in 1811 as well as the tradition’s continued impact on North American culture—from the expansion of African-American mutual-aid societies to the parody of Black performance in minstrelsy—and the successive reinterpretations of the festival in both Black and white communities, culminating in an attempt at reinvention under the guise of celebrating utopian racial harmony beginning in the 1980s.
Dewulf concludes by suggesting the need for a “new paradigm” in the analysis of slavery in North America, one that goes beyond models of assimilation, syncretism, or maintenance of African traditions in the New World by looking at European-African contact before enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas; one that does not only find resistance in the attachment to “pure” African traditions, and that understands African and African-American Christianity as not only a sign of submission, indoctrination, and assimilation; and one that prioritizes archival and translation work in materials other than English in order to better understand US history, particularly the history of slavery and race relations. Fortunately, scholars working in an array of disciplines are pursuing this work, as attested by the recent volume, Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (Penn State UP, 2019), edited by Cécile Fromont (to which Dewulf also contributed). The 1619 Project urged Americans to consider slavery, race relations, and the contributions of African Americans as central to US history; The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo shows us that we also need to think beyond 1619 and beyond the current borders of the US in order to better understand this history.
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[Review length: 904 words • Review posted on October 8, 2020]