The Afro-Brazilian residents of Salvador da Bahia —the “Black Mecca” located along the coast of northeastern Brazil—have drawn the interest of Brazilian and foreign scholars throughout the twentieth century. In their pioneering studies of Salvador’s Afro-Bahian communities, Nina Rodrigues, Melville and Frances Herksovits, Gilberto Freyre, Ruth Landes, and Pierre Verger helped build the foundations for contemporary studies of Brazil and the African Diaspora. At a time when a self-identified Afro-Bahian culture has assumed a central role in regional and national (as well as increasingly transnational) identity politics and economic planning, Bahia continues to attract the attention of Brazilian and foreign scholars interested in the African experience in the Americas.
Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics, a collection of eight articles edited by historian Hendrik Kraay, contains some of the most recent scholarship on Afro-Bahians and their place in Brazilian society. Kraay’s introductory essay outlines the central roles played by Africans and Afro-Brazilians in Bahia from the early days of the transatlantic slave trade through today’s proliferation of houses of candomblé, capoeira, and blocos afros. It also provides a brief demographic and economic history of colonial and nineteenth-century Bahia, where slave-based plantation agriculture gave rise to a New World society in which people of African descent were the majority population. Although Kraay is careful to point out that not all blacks in Bahia were slaves and not all Bahians were black, he makes clear that early Bahian society was formed out of the slave regime. The legacy of slavery would have lasting ramifications on the region’s economic and cultural development in the post-abolition period.
The articles, led by Kraay’s study of downward social mobility among free black militia officers during the era of independence, focus upon individual and collective biographies of Afro-Bahians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. None of the articles deal exclusively with enslaved Afro-Brazilians; manumitted slaves and free people of color are the main subjects in the studies authored by Kraay and Mary Ann Mahony. However, the culture of slavery pervades these authors’ analysis of the ideological and legal mechanisms that limited the social ascent of free people of color during the Empire and early Republic. The culture of Brazilian slave society—located at a nexus between African cultural imports and practices born on American plantations — also looms large in Dale Graden’s and Fayette Winberley’s studies on the spread of Afro-Brazilian religion in the decades preceding the abolition of 1888.
The articles on modern Bahia squarely locate Afro-Bahian political organization within cultural practices not immediately associated with such conventional political actors as political bosses, parties, labor unions, commercial associations, and the armed forces. Jocélio Teles dos Santos links capoeira to local strategies of political empowerment under the authoritarian political culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Kim Butler assesses the ideological and economic transformations that have accompanied the growth of Afro-Bahian cultural organizations such as Olodum. Michel Agier’s case study of the rebirth of the Vila Flaviana terreiro [candomblé house] — a highly compelling work of ethnography—illuminates the institutional and associational spaces in which Afro-Bahians have built cultural identities and support networks from which black activists and community leaders can build political movements. In all cases, the authors lead the reader to consider the potential for political empowerment embedded in the cultural expressions of blackness that propel the associational life and economic prosperity of Salvador and, increasingly, much of the Brazilian northeast.
Kraay merits recognition for his fine original scholarship, translations, and editorial choices. The collection should serve as a point of departure for humanists and social scientists interested in a region located at the intersection of the African Diaspora and Brazilian national identity.
