As Anadelia A. Romo states early on in Selling Black Brazil, it is widely accepted that the principal figures of her study—Jorge Amado, Pierre Verger, and Carybé, each the subject of one of the book's chapters—were among the “chief architects of a Bahian regional identity,” crucial in developing the notion of Salvador as a place of folklore, festivity, and, above all, Blackness (p. 19). What Romo shows here is how the Bahian writer, the French photographer, and the Argentine Brazilian artist and their partners developed this “trademark” through the emergent tourism industry in the 1940s and 1950s, thus defining the city in the eyes of Bahians, other Brazilians, and foreigners as the home of Black Brazil. Romo also documents these figures' reach, demonstrating not only the near ubiquity of their idea of Salvador but also the failure of alternate renderings of the city to find purchase.
Romo emphasizes the...
