Additional information
by Jeroen Dewulf (Author)
Winner of the New Netherland Institute Hendricks Award
The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo presents the history of the nation's forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey. It also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America's most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. Jeroen Dewulf rejects the usual interpretation of this celebration of a "slave king" as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual-aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing these traditions in an Atlantic context, Dewulf identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, and he traces these rituals to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa.
Author Biography
Jeroen Dewulf is associate professor of Dutch studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of Berkeley's Institute of European Studies. For his research on the early Dutch history of New York and the first slave community on Manhattan, he was distinguished with the New Netherland Institute Hendricks Award, the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Prize, and the Robert O. Collins Award in African Studies.
