The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions

Ten Defining the ‘‘Negro Problem’’ in Brazil: The Shifting Significance of Brazil’s African Heritage from the 1890s to the 1940s

ten ⭈ Defining the ‘‘Negro Problem’’ in Brazil: The Shifting Significance of Brazil’s African Heritage from the ∞∫Ω≠s to the ∞Ω∂≠s KELLY E. HAYES Arthur Hu√ Fauset’s Black Gods of the Metropolis was part of an extraordinary florescence of creative, intellectual, literary, and anthropological interest in the ‘‘New World Negro’’ in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Researchers in the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean in this period turned their attention to various aspects of black culture in the Americas, building on the work of pioneering forebears like W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter Woodson in the United States and Nina Rodrigues in Brazil. While most analysts of Black Gods of the Metropolis situate the book within the social and historical context of the United States, its truly groundbreaking aspects can best be appreciated when seen against the larger backdrop of Afro-diasporan studies of the 1930s and 1940s. As Fauset himself noted, much of the literature on New World black religions in this period focused on the presence of African cultural survivals, a framework that Fauset found inadequate for his own research. Although this approach was attractive for a number of reasons, its focus on a dehistoricized and romantic African past shifted scholarly attention away from issues of class and race particular to the American context in which these religions developed. These issues were central to Fauset’s analysis in Black Gods of the Metropolis and for his understanding of the success of the five cult groups that were the book’s subject. Further, by calling attention to the breathtaking eclecticism of Afro-American religious expression, Black Gods of the 210 Resurrecting Fauset’s Vision Metropolis suggested that Africa was not the only alternative heritage or source of identity available to blacks in the 1930s and 1940s. Despite these important contributions , Fauset’s work has languished, unknown to many students of black religions, while work that focused on the African dimensions of Afro-American religions achieved international recognition and authoritative status. An examination of the scholarly literature on black religions in Brazil helps illuminate the persuasive appeal of Africanity in transnational debates about the ‘‘New World Negro’’ that marked this period. Race and the African Heritage in Brazil As the largest importer of African slaves to the New World and the last country to finally abolish the trade, Brazil was one of the most important sites for debates about race and the significance of the New World’s African heritage. In the course of the 1930s and 1940s it quickly became a ‘‘locus classicus’’ in the social science literature, attracting scholars from both hemispheres of the Americas and Europe, including Melville Herskovits, E. Franklin Frazier, Ruth Landes, Roger Bastide, Alfred Métraux , Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.1 For many of these scholars, what was appealing about Brazil was the extent to which blacks had been able to preserve their African heritage in the context of a multiracial culture whose members seemed to live together in harmony. Most often, the comparison was to the United States, whose segregation and intolerance was invoked, explicitly or implicitly, to underscore Brazil’s ‘‘racial democracy.’’ Describing her research trip to Bahia in the late 1930s, Ruth Landes wrote: ‘‘We had heard that the large Negro population lived with ease and freedom among the general population and we wanted to know the details. We also wanted to know how that interracial situation di√ered from our own in the United States.’’2 Despite the absence of Jim Crow, Landes discovered that a variety of formal and informal mechanisms buttressed prejudicial attitudes about Afro-Brazilians and that race relations in Brazil were far more complex than she had thought. Although blacks ‘‘were at liberty to cultivate their African heritage’’ in the Afro-Brazilian religion of candomblé, Landes wrote, they were also ‘‘sick, undernourished, illiterate , and uninformed, just like poor people among them of other racial origins.’’ She concluded that the reason was not racism per se, but ‘‘political and economic tyrannies .’’ With little access to education or other avenues to upward social mobility, blacks had created an alternative universe in candomblé, whose ‘‘vigor and pageantry . . . were a matter of excitement and pride to the rest of Brazil too.’’3 Defining the ‘‘Negro Problem’’ in Brazil 211 In associating candomblé with an alternative African heritage, and the su√erings of blacks with socioeconomic...