Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola Available to Purchase

The postcolonial turn has prompted researchers to consider the uneven and fraught relationship between the colonizer and colonized, or more broadly the conqueror and the oppressed. When placing our subjects within this binary, we tend to afford the Indigenous communities we study power only as a form of resistance. In doing so, more complex cross-cultural exchanges such as the ones between the Capuchin friars and central Africans presented here are misunderstood. As a counterpoint, Cécile Fromont convincingly argues that European texts and images can hold a plurality of voices that should not be reduced to such binaries and that the images created by Europeans should be considered as part of a cross-cultural dialogue and often do contain local voice. With a focus on image and textual analysis, Fromont presents a strong case for a different, though likely unique dynamic relationship that existed in the early Atlantic or modern world. Through...