A Refuge in Thunder: Candomble and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (review)

A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and the Alternative Spaces of Blackness. By RACHEL E. HARDING. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xix, 251 pp. Cloth, $39.95.

This is the first full-length English-language historical study of Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion widely practiced in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Like much of the best recent literature on Afro-Brazil, Rachel Harding sets her subject in its broadest context of the African diaspora, pointing out the similarities that Candomblé shares with other forms of African-American religiosity, and informing her argument with an impressive theoretical apparatus drawn from anthropology, literature, and religious studies. In focusing on "the role of religion in the development of alternate meanings of human community and black identity within the matrix of slavery" (p. xvii), Harding's book effectively addresses central preoccupations of African-diaspora scholarship.

A Refuge in Thunder's core and strength lie in the author's careful and sophisticated analysis of 95 police documents that in some way refer to Candomblé between 1800 and 1888, which she sees as a nineteenth-century development in Afro-Bahian religiosity, characterized by the worship of multiple deities in a single house. She joins the by now well-established critique of early twentieth-century Nagô-centric scholarship in emphasizing that Candomblé grew out of more than just Yoruba culture. The primarily African leaders of these persecuted Candomblé communities and their African and Brazilian followers created "an Afro-Brazilian orientation to ultimate meaning," responding to "an existential situation of extraordinary personal and collective disaggregation and oppression," by focusing on healing and the cultivation of axé, the divine spirit (p. 77). In many ways, Harding's story is thus, like so much recent scholarship on slavery, a tale of survival and even triumph in the face of unimaginable adversity, and police records, despite their biases, are once again revealed as an unmatched source, especially when handled by a skilled historian, and in this case, one as knowledgeable about contemporary Candomblé as Harding.

But the source base may be insufficient to carry the argument. At best, the author can only infer that Candomblé participants were creating "black identity," as opposed to, for example, a religious one, and she may be imposing late-twentieth-century racial categories on her earlier period. At the same time, this book reveals the limits imposed by the artisanal nature of historical research. To be sure, Harding must be commended for locating 95 documents on Candomblé, but this remains a small number of isolated references, and she struggles (valiantly) against this legacy of the "dis continuity" imposed on black culture in the New World. The definitive study of Candomblé awaits a collaborative effort among Bahia's historians to pull together all the references to the religion scattered throughout Bahia's archives and newspapers. Harding's generous sharing of some of her documents (in both their original Portuguese and in translation) in the book's appendix is a step in the right direction, but given professional imperatives to publish individually authored works, such a collaborative project unfortunately may be impossible.

Indiana University Press should bring out a paperback edition, for the book's length (161 pages of text) and documentary appendix make it an ideal classroom tool, but a few revisions will make it much more accessible to students. The document translations are sloppily done and sometimes misleading; students will find the text overburdened with Portuguese words (at least a fifth of the terms in the glossary have unambiguous English equivalents); and the absence of a map is curious in a book that emphasizes space in its argument. Experts will not be hampered by these matters, and they will recognize this as an important contribution, but not yet the definitive historical work on Candomblé.

HENDRIK KRAAY, University of Calgary

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