Relocating the Sacred

Relocating the Sacred

Author: Niyi Afolabi

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2022-11-01

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 1438490739

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Although Brazil is home to the largest African diaspora, the religions of its African descendants have often been syncretized and submerged, first under the force of colonialism and enslavement and later under the spurious banner of a harmonious national Brazilian character. Relocating the Sacred argues that these religions nevertheless have been preserved and manifested in a strategic corpus of shifting masks and masquerades of Afro-Brazilian identity. Following the re-Africanization process and black consciousness movement of the 1970s to 1990s, Afro-Brazilians have questioned racial democracy, seeing how its claim to harmony actually dispossesses them of political power. By embracing African deities as a source of creative inspiration and resistance, Afro-Brazilians have appropriated syncretism as a means of not only popularizing African culture but also decolonizing themselves from the past shame of slavery. This book maps the role of African heritage in—and relocation of the sacred to—three sites of Brazilian cultural production: ritual altars, literature, and carnival culture.


The Making of Brazil's Black Mecca

The Making of Brazil's Black Mecca

Author: Scott Ickes

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2018-10-01

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 162895356X

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One of the few interdisciplinary volumes on Bahia available, The Making of Brazil’s Black Mecca: Bahia Reconsidered contains contributions covering a wide chronological and topical range by scholars whose work has made important contributions to the field of Bahian studies over the last two decades. The authors interrogate and problematize the idea of Bahia as a Black Mecca, or a haven where Brazilians of African descent can embrace their cultural and spiritual African heritage without fear of discrimination. In the first section, leading historians create a century-long historical narrative of the emergence of these discourses, their limitations, and their inability to effect meaningful structural change. The chapters by social scientists in the second section present critical reflections and insights, some provocative, on deficiencies and problematic biases built into current research paradigms on blackness in Bahia. As a whole the text provides a series of insights into the ways that inequality has been structured in Bahia since the final days of slavery.


Selling Black Brazil

Selling Black Brazil

Author: Anadelia Romo

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1477324216

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2023 Honorable Mention, Brazil Section Humanities Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association (LASA) This book explores visual portrayals of blackness in Brazil to reveal the integral role of visual culture in crafting race and nation across Latin America. In the early twentieth century, Brazil shifted from a nation intent on whitening its population to one billing itself as a racial democracy. Anadelia Romo shows that this shift centered in Salvador, Bahia, where throughout the 1950s, modernist artists and intellectuals forged critical alliances with Afro-Brazilian religious communities of Candomblé to promote their culture and their city. These efforts combined with a growing promotion of tourism to transform what had been one of the busiest slaving depots in the Americas into a popular tourist enclave celebrated for its rich Afro-Brazilian culture. Vibrant illustrations and texts by the likes of Jorge Amado, Pierre Verger, and others contributed to a distinctive iconography of the city, with Afro-Bahians at its center. But these optimistic visions of inclusion, Romo reveals, concealed deep racial inequalities. Illustrating how these visual archetypes laid the foundation for Salvador’s modern racial landscape, this book unveils the ways ethnic and racial populations have been both included and excluded not only in Brazil but in Latin America as a whole.


From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil

From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil

Author: Dale Torston Graden

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780826340511

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The political and religious forces which led to the decline of the slave trade in nineteenth century Bahia, Brazil.


'ReCapricorning' the Atlantic

'ReCapricorning' the Atlantic

Author: Peter M. Beattie

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2010-03-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0299237834

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This special issue of Luso-Brazilian Review includes articles on the Lusophone South Atlantic by historians of Africa and Brazil originally presented in May of 2006 at the Michigan State University and University of Michigan’s Atlantic History Workshop “ReCapricorning the Atlantic: Luso-Brazilian and Luso-African Perspectives on the Atlantic World.” Workshop participants set out to “ReCapricorn the Atlantic” by assessing how new research on the Lusophone South Atlantic modifies, challenges, or confirms major trends and paradigms in the expanding scholarship on Atlantic History.


Brazil: A Biography

Brazil: A Biography

Author: Lilia M. Schwarcz

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2018-08-21

Total Pages: 517

ISBN-13: 0374710708

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A sweeping and absorbing biography of Brazil, from the sixteenth century to the present For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown. In an extraordinary journey that spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling’s Brazil offers a rich, dramatic history of this complex country. The authors not only reconstruct the epic story of the nation but follow the shifting byways of food, art, and popular culture; the plights of minorities; and the ups and downs of economic cycles. Drawing on a range of original scholarship in history, anthropology, political science, and economics, Schwarcz and Starling reveal a long process of unfinished social, political, and economic progress and struggle, a story in which the troubled legacy of the mixing of races and postcolonial political dysfunction persist to this day.


Queering Black Atlantic Religions

Queering Black Atlantic Religions

Author: Roberto Strongman

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2019-03-14

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1478003456

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In Queering Black Atlantic Religions Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the divine produces gender identities that are independent of biological sex. As opposed to the Cartesian view of the spirit as locked within the body, the body in Afro-diasporic religions is an open receptacle. Showing how trance possession is a primary aspect of almost all Afro-diasporic cultural production, Strongman articulates transcorporeality as a black, trans-Atlantic understanding of the human psyche, soul, and gender as multiple, removable, and external to the body.


Reinventing Religions

Reinventing Religions

Author: Sidney M. Greenfield

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9780847688531

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Once a central concept in anthropology, syncretism has recently re-emerged as a valuable tool for understanding the complex dynamics of ethnicity, postcolonialism, and transnationalism. Building on a century-long tradition of scholarship, this important book formulates a broader view of the mixing and interpenetration of religious beliefs and practices, primarily from Africa and Europe, highlighting the ways in which religions and cultures on both sides of the Atlantic have been assimilated and innovatively changed. Divided into four sections, the book focuses on religious syncretism in Brazil, Jamaica, and other parts of the Caribbean and West Africa. Greenfield and Droogers have brought together an array of outstanding international scholars whose rich and varied essays on specific geographical locales and customs comprise an innovative and comprehensive view of the transference of religious traditions and their continuity and reformulation on two continents.


The New Black Gods

The New Black Gods

Author: Edward E. Curtis IV

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2009-04-23

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 025300408X

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Taking the influential work of Arthur Huff Fauset as a starting point to break down the false dichotomy that exists between mainstream and marginal, a new generation of scholars offers fresh ideas for understanding the religious expressions of African Americans in the United States. Fauset's 1944 classic, Black Gods of the Metropolis, launched original methods and theories for thinking about African American religions as modern, cosmopolitan, and democratic. The essays in this collection show the diversity of African American religion in the wake of the Great Migration and consider the full field of African American religion from Pentecostalism to Black Judaism, Black Islam, and Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement. As a whole, they create a dynamic, humanistic, and thoroughly interdisciplinary understanding of African American religious history and life. This book is essential reading for anyone who studies the African American experience.