The Kongo Kingdom : The Origins, Dynamics and Cosmopolitan Culture of an African Polity

"The Kongo kingdom, which arose in the Atlantic Coast region of West-Central Africa, is a famous emblem of Africa's past yet little is still known of its origins and early history. This book sheds new light on that all important period and goes on to explain the significance of its cosmopolitan culture in the wider world. Bringing together different new strands of historical evidence as well as scholars from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, art history, history and linguistics, it is the first book to approach the history of this famous Central African kingdom from a cross-disciplinary perspective. All chapters are written by distinguished and/or upcoming experts of Kongo history with a focus on political space, taking us through processes of centralisation and decentralisation, the historical politics of extraversion and internal dynamics, and the geographical distribution of aspects of material and immaterial Kongo culture"-- Provided by publisher Contents 5 Figures 7 Tables 10 Contributors 11 Introduction: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Kongo History 13 Part I The Origins and Dynamics of the Kongo Kingdom 27 1 The Origins of Kongo: A Revised Vision 29 2 A Central African Kingdom: Kongo in 1480 54 3 Seventeenth-Century Kikongo Is Not the Ancestor of PresentDay Kikongo 72 4 Soyo and Kongo : The Undoing of the Kingdom’s Centralization 115 5 The Eastern Border of the Kongo Kingdom: On Relocating the Hydronym Barbela 135 Part II Kongo’s Cosmopolitan Culture and the Wider World 153 6 From Image to Grave and Back: Multidisciplinary Inquiries into Kongo Christian Visual Culture 155 7 Ceramics Decorated with Woven Motifs: An Archaeological Kongo Kingdom Identifier? 177 8 From America to Africa: How Kongo Nobility Made Smoking Pipes Their Own 209 9 ‘To Make Book’: A Conceptual Historical Approach to Kongo Book Cultures (Sixteenth– Nineteenth Centuries) 228 10 Kongo Cosmopolitans in the Nineteenth Century 247 11 The Making of Kongo Identity in the American Diaspora: A Case Study From Brazil 266 Bibliography 287 Index 327