African Diaspora in Brazil

History, Culture and Politics

Fassil Demissie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415824811
• eBook ISBN: 9781134918843
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The term 'Black Atlantic' was coined to describe the social, cultural and political space that emerged out of the experience of slavery, exile, oppression, exploitation and resistance. This volume seeks to recast a new map of the 'Black Atlantic' beyond the Anglophone Atlantic zone by focusing on Brazil as a social and cultural space born out of the Atlantic slave trade.

The contributors draw from the recently reinvigorated scholarly debates which have shifted inquiry from the explicit study of cultural 'survival' and 'acculturation' towards an emphasis on placing Africans and their descendants at the center of their own histories. Going beyond the notion of cultural 'survival' or 'creolization', the contributors explore different sites of power and resistance, gendered cartographies, memory, and the various social and cultural networks and institutions that Africans and their descendants created and developed in Brazil. This book illuminates the linkages, networks, disjunctions, sense of collective consciousness, memory and cultural imagination among the African-descended populations in Brazil.

This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

Introduction

“…there is no way to pay back our historical debt to Africa”¹ Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva – Former President of Brazil

The publication of C. L. R. James’s, The Black Jacobins (1938) established in the Americas the conceptual approach that would guide the emergent research interest in the African Diaspora during the first half of the twentieth century. In foregrounding the struggles of San Domingo’s Haitian slaves for freedom against French colonialism, James moved African slaves from the background to the center of his account and examined their struggles in a transnational and transoceanic context. James’s seminal work established the circum-Atlantic as a space of historical and cultural production and a site that illuminates the mutual transformation of the diverse transnational, trans-imperial and transoceanic populations of the African Diaspora that Robert F. Thompson (1983) and Paul Gilroy later referred to as the Black Atlantic. In his much cited work, Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, (1995, p. 15), invited “cultural historians [to] take the Atlantic as the major, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.” For Gilroy, the Black Atlantic can be seen as a “counter-culture to modernity” (i.e. a practice rather than a merely intellectual “counter-discourse” and a fundamental critique of the contradictions and injustices of capitalist modernity (1995, p. 18).

Two critical arguments and motifs stand out as being critical to Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic. First, the metaphor of a sailing ship where Gilroy offers the image of the sailing ship as a “chronotope” that suggests several dimensions of the Black Atlantic as a space of encounter. The sailing ship captures the specifics of traveling within and outside national boundaries and at the same time, it evokes the middle passage and the horrors of slave trade that is fundamental to understanding the central experience of the African diaspora. As Gilroy has succinctly noted,

I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organizing symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point. The image of the ship—a living, microcultural, micro-political system in motion—is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons…Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs (1995, p. 4).

Second, crucial to Gilroy’s argument about the Black Atlantic is the ways in which slavery in the West is primarily a shared experience of “terror” that lies at the center of black diasporic communities all across the circum-Atlantic. The slave trade was fundamentally a commercial enterprise, which allowed Western modernity to achieve its economic and cultural dominance. Hence, the slave journeys of the Middle Passage and its terror have a pre-eminent and foundational position, inscribed with profound critiques of modernity itself.

The idea of the Black Atlantic in this volume argues for examining the specifities of African diaspora history, culture and politics and highlights an ongoing interest in remapping the cartography of the Black Atlantic beyond the original formulation by Gilroy (1995).² Growing out of an awareness of the multiciplicty of the circum-Atlantic cultures, their networks, flows and cultural exchanges, this book focuses on the history, culture and politics of African descendant population in Brazil. It also affirms their agency and actors in the making of their own histories.

Brazil and the Atlantic Slave Trade

One of the most heavily travelled routes of the Atlantic during the slave trade was a dangerous passage that linked West Africa, the Angolan and Kongo coastal region with the Americas. An estimated 12.5 million enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas over the 400-year history of forced migration. To illustrate the magnitude of this forced migration, before 1820 about three quarters of all people arriving in the new world came from Africa (Eltis and Richardson, 2008, pp. 12, 37). Historians have calculated that more than 35 per cent of those African slaves who were forcibly removed from Africa ended up in Brazil, while only 4 per cent went to the United States. Because many African slaves perished, in the “middle passage” as well as in the plantation and mines they labored and deadly diseases they faced in Brazil, Portugal continued to import enslaved Africans from West Africa and Angola to replace those who died on the plantations and mines until slavery was finally abolished in the mid-1880s.³

It is very difficult to establish exactly when the first African slaves landed in Brazil. However, the earliest recorded shipment of slaves from Africa to Brazil was made by a slave dealer, Lopes Bixorda, in 1538 in Bahia (Rout, 1976, pp. 73) In the space of two and a half centuries, the majority of African slaves arrived in Bahia and thus established Brazil as the main destination point for the largest number of Africans in the African Diaspora. The flow of this forced migration was initially directed to the sugar plantations located on the coast of northeast Brazil. Records of sugar plantations from Bahia, one of the principal sugar producers in the Americas during the seventeenth century, suggest that the labor force used on these plantations changed from being predominantly indigenous Amerindian to being primarily African during the first two decades of the sixteenth century and by the first half of the seventeenth century dependence on slave labor completely transformed the labor force of the sugar plantations of Brazil (Schwatrz, 1985, pp. 65-72).

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the discovery of gold in the state of Minas Gerais created the need for African slaves in the interior of Brazil. A number of Portuguese colonists rushed to these mines and along with them, they brought many more African slaves. Most of these slaves arrived through the port of Rio de Janeiro, and these slaves were then marched overland to Minas Gerais to toil not only in the gold and diamond mines but also in building stately mansions and churches (Boxer, 1962, pp. 35-54).

The center of gravity of the African slave population in Brazil shifted to the region located between the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro as coffee replaced precious minerals and became Brazil’s most important source of wealth. The shift also increased the use of African slave labor in the production of coffee especially on large plantations (Klein & Luna, 2010, pp. 90-105). Even after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1888, Brazilian coffee growers continued to use slave labor during the most part of the nineteenth century.

The African slaves in Brazil deeply shaped the history of Brazil. Signs of African influence are present in almost every aspect of Brazilian culture and society, from food, religion, architecture, music and festivities, such as samba and carnival, to religion, as evident in the cults of African deities of candomblé. As a result of the intensive use of African slaves in the production of sugar, gold and coffee from the early years of colonization until late in the nineteenth century, Brazil has today one of the largest populations of African descent outside Africa.

The historical geography and the specifities of different trajectories of African slaves in the Americas led to the spirited Herskovits-Frazier debates during the first half of the twentieth century regarding the origin of African culture in the United States and by extension throughout the Americas. The anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963) argued that Blacks in the Americas “retained” some greater or lesser legacy of African cultural past and rejected what he considered a pernicious myth to believe that the Africans in the Americas had no past. In his much cited work, The Myth of the Negro Past, published in 1941, Herskovits set out to prove that Africans in the Americas retained cultural forms and institutions such as language, dance, clothing, dress, planting techniques, and medical knowledge that helped them survive despite the harsh and brutal nature of slavery. He challenged the notion advanced by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962) that slavery had stripped its victims of their African heritage. In his view, Blacks in the United States retained nothing of African language, social and cultural organization as well as their religion (Frazier, 1939, p. 21). Over the next decades, Herskovits and his followers searched extensively for the retention of specific African cultural traits in the Americas, emphasizing carryovers in language, the arts and especially religion (Herskovits, 1941).

The study of the African slaves in the historical geography of in the Americas has been reinvigorated in recent decades by a robust debate as scholars have shifted their inquiry from the earlier explicit study of cultural “survival” and “acculturation” towards an emphasis on placing Africans and their descendants at the center of their own histories. Going beyond the notion of cultural “survival” or “creolization”, scholars now explore different sites of power and resistance, gendered cartographies, memory, and the various social and cultural networks and institutions that Africans and their descendants created and developed, reflecting an array of cultural richness and diversity in transforming their social and material conditions (Mintz and Price, 1976; Joyner, 1984; Vlach, 1990).

The contributions in this volume collectively explore the artistic, literary, musical, religious, cultural, political, and historical links that have cross-fertilized the “Black Atlantic” where meanings of “race” and gender and have been interwoven with understandings of identity, belonging and citizenship. In more than one way, this book invokes the earlier call by Paul Gilroy to draw “a new map” of the “Black Atlantic” which would illuminate the linkages, networks, disjunctions, sense of collective consciousness, memory, history and cultural production of the African descendant populations in Brazil.

Notes

1 Portuguese Institute of International Relations and Security, (IPRIS) Viewpoints, Sept. 2010.

2 Gilroy’s book has been both influential and controversial, though he does point out that “Black Atlantic culture is…massive and its history so little known”, and that in his book he has “scarcely done more than put down some preliminary markers for more detailed future investigations. My concerns are heuristic and my conclusions are strictly provisional. There are also many obvious omissions”; Gilroy (1995, p. xi). Critics of Gilroy often over look this important caveat. Lucy Evans has recently provided an excellent summary of the critical reception of Gilroy’s text in ‘The Black Atlantic: Exploring Gilroy’s Legacy’, Atlantic Studies, 6.2, Aug. 2009.

3 Slavery was not abolished in Brazil until 1888, the last nation in the Western hemisphere to abolish it.

Bibliography

Boxer, C. R., 1962. The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695-1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society. Berkeley: University of California.

Eltis, D. and Richardson, D., 2008. Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Frazier E. F., 1939. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gilroy, P., 1995. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Herskovits, M. J., 1941. The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper.

James, C. L. R., 2001 [1938]. The Black Jacobins L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Penguin Books.

Joyner, C., 1984. Down by the Riverside. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Klein, H. S. and Luna, F. V., 2010. Slavery in Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mintz, S. and Price, R., 1976. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Rout, L.B., 1976. Race and Slavery in Brazil. The Wilson Quarterly, 1(1), pp. 73-89.

Schwartz, S. B., 1985. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia, 1550-1835. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, R. F., 1983. Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy. New York: Vintage.

Vlach, J., 1990. The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Deconstructing invisibility: race and politics of visual culture in Brazil

Julio Cesar de Tavares

Department of Anthropology,Federal Fluminense University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This paper aims to discuss race relations and power-building in Brazil. It is well known that the Iberian colonizers developed special ways of imposing their supremacy, dissimulating the skin color standards to provoke some type of beliefs about shade stratification among African descendents, indigenous and mixed-race people. For the first time in South America there are deconstructive projects of that colonial paradigm still alive and strongly embedded in the media landscape. However, new identity politics and attitudes have been emerging amidst this old social cognition. This paper will discuss some speculative thoughts and power-building scenarios on new representations and struggles derived from these lived forms that are emerging in the new racial formations in Latin America. The question is: what will nation-building in the midst of this changing imagery be like? This paper proposes that a civic pedagogy is the only answer to rendering this phenomenon visible.

Introduction: lack of respect and recognition

I prefer to see this text, which is part of a larger study, as a ‘working paper’. It presents some preliminary ideas for reflection on race relations, the media, and the Brazilian national imaginary, topics that rarely find space fordevelopment in the academic arena.

My paper will follow this basic structure: first, I seek to justify my persp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Deconstructing invisibility: race and politics of visual culture in Brazil
• 3. Retaking the Middle Passage: glimpses of a modern African diaspora in Brazil
• 4. Afro-Brazilian poetry: a laboratory of identity
• 5. Blackness in movement: identifying with capoeira Angola in and out of Brazil
• 6. The jogo de capoeira and the fallacy of ‘creole’ cultural forms
• 7. A Bença: The Blessings of the Bando de Teatro Olodum
• 8. Food and spirits: religion, gender, and identity in the ‘African’ cuisine of Northeast Brazil
• 9. Black leaders and their concept of freedom in nineteenth century northeast Brazil
• 10. The struggle for black land rights in Brazil: an insider’s view on quilombos and the quilombo land movement
• 11. Race talk in a public high school in Salvador Bahia: discourses of power and resistance
• Index