Cahiers d’études africaines is the premier French journal of African studies. Founded in i960, it helped to define modern African studies for the French-speaking intellectual world. Until the publication of this special issue dedicated to Roger Bastide, however, the journal had generally eschewed issues raised by the African diaspora. The editors’ decision to publish this issue, and to announce that the journal would continue to interest itself in the African diaspora, marks an important change in the journal’s history and in the field of African studies.
This issue comprises five major articles, plus reviews and other pieces, all devoted to American issues. As the subtitle, “Politique d’identité. Les noirs au Brésil,” reveals, the issue concentrates especially on twentieth-century Brazil. Only one article, by João José Reis, deals with the period of slavery; the rest deal with contemporary politics and religious life, especially the Afro-Brazilian religious cults.
One might have hoped that a journal dealing with African studies would have sought to include the African dimension of Afro-Brazilian life, for it is here that Africanists might be able to make an impact. Brazilian studies has been hampered by its relatively simplistic handling of the African background, a problem that is likely to be resolved only by appealing to the fruits of more than 30 years of Africanist research that Cahiers is heir to. Although Africa is alluded to—by Reis in his discussion of African “nations” helping or hurting resistance in the period of slavery, and by the two articles devoted to Afro-Brazilian religions—none of the writers engages African studies seriously. Thus although Jocélio Teles dos Santos and Véronique Boyer-Araujo both discuss the role of Caboclo, a divinity of apparently native American origin, in the Yoruba-based religion of Candomblé, they do not examine the dynamic of Yoruba religion as it is being discussed in recent work by David Lai tan, Karen Barber, J. D. Y. Peel, or Andrew Apter.
Having noted this weakness, however, it must be said that the work published in this issue is of very high caliber. It is well researched, focused on the leading-edge thought (and produced by the leading-edge scholars) in modern Brazilian studies. Reis’s lead-off piece on slave resistance focuses on the role of African nationalities as both a divisive element and a unifying thread in the struggle against slavery and domination. It is followed by two pairs of articles, one pair devoted to the role of race and class in modern Brazil, the other to Caboclo and Candomblé.
Antonio Sergio Alfredo Guimarães examines Brazil’s movement since the 1950s from a status society based on color to a class society resulting from industrialization, and finds that color is less important than it once was. While not directly contesting Guimarães, Michel Agier explores the rise négritude in Brazilian life and the reorganization of status, class, and color in a society still defined largely by racism.
In the articles devoted to Caboclo, Teles dos Santos notes that this figure has been integrated into the Candomblé symbol system in consonance with the Yoruba gods. Boyer-Araujo, on the other hand, sees Caboclo as a voice for the poor and dispossessed in the larger Candomble system. Like the essays on race and class, the pairing of these articles is based not on diametrically opposed positions but on subde differences in emphasis.
All the contributions here will be a worthwhile addition to Brazilian studies, though not yet the contribution that one might hope an Africanist journal could make. But these articles mark the commencement of what may be a deeper and more lasting collaboration of Africanists and students of African American culture. One hopes they will stimulate more contributions in the future.
