Black Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil by Keisha-Khan Perry (review)

Keisha-Khan Perry’s Black Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil focuses on the relations of race to land and water resources in Salvador, Bahia. She analyzes the struggles of black women activists of the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood against displacement. The contests with urban developers take place as part of a long history of dislocation of the city’s black residents to urban peripheries. Perry shows how these women resist and intervene in this history. The activists of Gamboa de Baixo organize themselves as black women to gain political power. Perry’s book is an analysis of how they do so. It is also an analysis of why they must. Without hyperbole and in ethnographic detail, we learn that the central struggle of the Gamboa de Baixo activists is one of survival. Perry details how the activists pursue and realize coalitions, devise strategy and tactics for protests, as well as gather and share data towards collective action within and across black communities in Salvador. The women also navigate asymmetries within their communities, across class and gender lines, as well as divergences between members of the neighborhood belonging to different waves of migration.

While reading, I was reminded of Gil Scott-Heron’s poem, “Who Will Survive in America?” The poem similarly revels in awakening to the fictions of history and confronting the unrealized promises of liberal democratic freedom. Perry’s book is more hopeful than Scott-Heron’s work. The women of Gamboa de Baixo make gains. They hold on. They believe in their struggle as citizens of Brazil. The stakes made clear in Perry’s book effectively put the question to Brazil: “Who Will Survive?” This occurs not as a point of comparison with the US or other regions of the black diaspora, but as a point of fact lent by the commonalities and particularities of Brazil.

Black Women Against the Land Grab is an excellent contribution to scholarship on race in Brazil in its focus on actors who consciously act towards countering material precariousness as politicized black subjects. Famously, Brazil’s version of racial ideology and racial hierarchy operates through colorism, which presents what has been called “racial malleability” or ambiguity in which no one is completely monoracial (Pinho 2009:40). In Brazil, one aspires to move away from identification with blackness through phenotypic characteristics or ways of acting that approximate whiteness. Yet, as Vargas (2004) argues, such colorism logically presupposes a binary of black-white. He writes,

There would be no color multiplicity if it were not for the awareness of the races that generated them. Indeed, the common saying that “passou de branco preto é,” literally meaning “if you’re beyond white [or, if you can’t pass as white] then you’re black,” reveals that underlying the color spectrum is a clear understanding of a white/non-white binary system that determines social privileges based on race.

(2004:449)

Perry’s approach refreshingly takes as its point of departure something like what Fanon (1967) referred to as the “fact of blackness”—for example, when Fanon writes, “I am given no chance. I am over determined from without” (1967:116). Perry states directly that she is rebutting scholarship that treats race (and blackness) as primarily ambiguous or subject to self-questioning and debate. The black women activists of Gamboa de Baixo explicitly articulate their mobilizations for land ownership as a confrontation with racial and gendered oppression. Such consciousness recurs at moments of interaction with employers, meetings with public officials, and other points of encounter both quotidian and unique to moments of protests.

Perry’s book invites more scholarship on the formation of political subjectivities by processes of political and economic transformation in Brazil. She describes the construction of a type of politics in which there is a preference for collective social transformation by the Gamboa de Baixo activists. Perry writes that for...