Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy by John F. Collins (review)

The Pelourinho is a neighborhood named after a whipping post. It is also one of Brazil’s preeminent tourist attractions. The state of Bahia has often been described as Brazil’s African Heart. Salvador is the capital of Bahia and it was once the capital of Portugal’s empire. The Pelourinho is the heart of the city of Salvador. Its collection of baroque architecture is unrivaled in the Americas. Recently, UNESCO designated it as a World Heritage Site. For decades, the Brazilian state has sponsored efforts to preserve the heritage of the Pelourinho, to transform it into a focal point for national identity, and to make it an engine for the accumulation of capital. The biggest obstacles have been its inhabitants.

John Collins, author of Revolt of the Saints, lived in, around, and through the Pelourinho for more than 15 years. During some of this time, he was self-consciously conducting ethnographic fieldwork. During much of the time, he was just making ends meet, raising a family, and selling jewelry made of copper wire and plumbing epoxy to tourists at Afrocentric concerts. As a result, he gained a unique perspective on the neighborhood, as well as its residents and their struggles with the intertwined forces of the police and the heritage bureaucracy.

This book contrasts the utopian promises of UNESCO with what happened at the turn of the millennium as the Pelourinho was transformed from cracôlandia (Crackland) into an Historic Center. The neighborhood became a monument to the vitality of Afro-Brazilians and a place where Afro-Brazilian bodies were subject to expulsion. The residents of the Pelourinho were canonized as secular saints for their role in the production of an essentialized Afro-Brazilian culture, their everyday lives transmuted into universal values by a corps of government social scientists. Then the police expelled them from their ramshackle homes. A few escaped from the whipping post by marrying one of the thousands of foreign tourists who passed through in search of cultural authenticity. Some succumbed to addiction, AIDS, or both. Some took their government indemnifications and moved to peripheral slums. Others are dead or in jail. Very few remain in the Historic Center now that it has become an icon of Brazil’s African past.

Revolt of the Saints is about race, ruin, and the production of cultural heritage, but it is much more than that. Collins emphasizes the elision of people and places and the fundamental disconnect between the grandeur of the buildings in the Pelourinho and the poverty, sexuality, and pigmentation of the people who inhabit them. He sees race in Brazil as a semiotic ideology that is shot through the fabric of social life. Race is not just a problem of classification or a question of ancestry or appearance. Or, perhaps, it is all these things and more, since the fundamental signifier is the racialized body. Bodies have a materiality that transcends and upends any attempt to assign them a single meaning.

The referential ambiguity of race in Brazil exists in a tense relationship with the homogenizing and reifying tendencies of the archive. This book historicizes the archive as a site of production of knowledge about the past in an attempt to control the future. In the introduction and conclusion, Collins inquires into the materiality and meaning of the documents produced by social scientists. Such documents have a pernicious kind of instrumentality. They attempt to preserve African patrimony while simultaneously cleansing public space of Afro-Brazilian people. Collins positions himself as a mole in the social scientific juggernaut that attacked his informants, whose quotidian practices became the stuff of national essence. They were simultaneously sacralized and commodified. He titled his book “The Revolt of the Saints” because the technocratic processes of the production of history are revolting to its subjects.

The first chapter sprawls across crackhouse reggae concerts where Pentecostal Rastas sing love songs to the police and...