Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes the new idea of the space of correlation as an analytical tool to study the cross-cultural encounter between early modern central African and European religious thought, visual forms, and political systems, from which emerged Kongo Christianity.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on the advent and evolution of Kongo Christian visual culture between the sixteenth and eighteenth century, this paper explores the idea of the space of correlation as a new tool to approach and analyze cross-cultural religious and artistic encounters. It argues that the elite of the kingdom used narratives, artworks, and visual culture at large as conceptual spaces of correlation within which they recast heterogeneous local and foreign ideas and forms into newly interrelated parts of the evolving worldview that was Kongo Christianity. I use the idea of the space of correlation to outline how the newly minted Kongo Christian discourse did not merely combine disparate elements, but possessed the transformative power to redefine them into the constitutive and intimately correlated parts of a new system of religious thought, artistic expression, and political organization.

Finally, this paper examines how the new idea may allow us to examine a range of phenomena that have defied the analytical potential of otherwise useful notions such as transculturation, third-space, or the once-favored term of hybridity.