Skip to content
IUScholarWorks Journals
Steve Selka - Review of Scott Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

.

Click Here for Review

As the so-called “cradle of Brazilian civilization,” the state of Bahia is central to narratives of Brazilian identity and to Brazil’s image abroad. Scott Ickes’s African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil focuses on the role that Afro-Brazilian cultural and religious practices play in this image. Indeed, by the twenty-first century, Afro-Brazilian practices such as Candomblé, capoeira, and samba had become Bahia’s “trademark.” Through extensive archival work, Ickes analyzes the important period from 1930 to 1954, during which the incorporation of Afro-Brazilian culture into dominant images of Bahian identity began.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Bahian elites generally viewed Afro-Brazilian cultural practices as inimical to modernization, and during this period, Candomblé, capoeira, and samba were subject to police repression. While this disparaging view of African culture was never unanimous, it was not until the 1930s that those who celebrated the African component of Bahian identity began to shape public discussions of what it meant to be Bahian. This shift paralleled efforts at the national level to define what was distinctive about Brazilian identity under the governments of Getúlio Vargas and in the context of Brazil’s modernist movement. Against that backdrop, Bahia situated itself as a place of African and European mixture and as the traditional Brazilian homeland in contrast to the industrializing center-south of the country, as embodied in the city of São Paulo.

Bahian elites play a large role in the story Ickes tells. Yet this is not a simple narrative of cultural appropriation. Along these lines, Ickes pays close attention to both tensions and alliances between white elites and the Afro-Brazilian working class in Bahia. In his discussion of governor Juracy Magalhães (Getúlio Vargas’s interventor in Bahia in the 1930s), for example, Ickes stresses the ways in which Magalhães’s public support for Afro-Brazilian culture helped him create networks of patronage among Bahia's working class. At the same time, Ickes emphasizes that public recognition of popular festivals was also the result of pressure from Afro-Brazilians themselves. In this way, he attends to the complex engagements between white elites and the Afro-Brazilian working class without glossing over the unequal relations of power between them.

Festivals often dramatize these engagements in the public spaces of the city, and in his later chapters Ickes draws out the complex interplay of interests around popular celebrations and cultural performances. Indeed, these are events where the religious, the cultural, the social, and the political intersect and intertwine. In chapters 3 and 4, for example, he details the tensions, but also the negotiations, between Catholic authorities, Candomblé communities, and the state government around the syncretic festival of the Washing of Bonfim, a celebration that is iconic of the city of Salvador. Likewise, in chapter 5 he explores how the emergence of specifically Afro-Brazilian Carnaval groups, namely batucadas and afoxés, was as much about negotiating inclusion by celebrating baianidade as it was about racial affirmation.

Throughout the book Ickes emphasizes the central role that journalists played in the construction of Bahia’s African identity. At one level, newspapers chronicle and characterize the events and celebrations that are the focus of the book, providing a sense of shifting understandings of baianidade. Moreover, as Ickes stresses, the press did more than reflect changing attitudes; it was instrumental in imagining Bahia as distinctive in the first place. Along similar lines, Ickes also emphasizes how visual artists helped to construct iconic images of Bahia, including through the photographs of the self-taught ethnographer Pierre Verger and the paintings and sculptures of the artist Carybé.

One of the merits of the book is its focus on the Bahian scene, providing us with a locally grounded view of this critical period. Yet more attention to the wider contexts to which these public investments in Afro-Brazilian culture were responding would have been helpful here and there. While the celebration of Bahian culture reflected national concerns with Brazilian identity, for example, it also stressed a regional identity that pushed back against Vargas’s emphasis on federalism and industrialization in the south. Yet, that Ickes does not dwell on that makes sense given the focus of the book and it does not detract from its important contribution to Brazilian Studies. African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil is essential reading for those interested in Brazilian and Bahian studies in general and the complex intersection of the Afro-Brazilian working class, Afro-Brazilian culture, and the Bahian elite in particular.

--------

[Review length: 732 words • Review posted on April 6, 2016]