African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Alberto, “Para africano ver”; Dávila, Hotel Trópico, 55–59; Araujo, Public Memory of Slavery, 63–64. In 2006, when the Brazilian government organized the Second Conference of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora, they chose Salvador to host the event. President Lula da Silva officially opened the conference. “Second Conference of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora, Salvador de [sic] Bahia, Brazil, 12–14 July 2006,” UNESCO document 175 EX/21, 1 September 2006, Unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0014/001469/146986e.pdf/. On the centrality and relevance of culture in Salvador, see Risério, História da cidade da Bahia, 584. Risério points out that the culture industries in the state currently generate more income than the tourist sector. 2. In Negro no Brasil, 7, Edison Carneiro and Aydano Ferraz credited Eugênia Anna dos Santos (Mãe Aninha) with popularizing the phrase “Roma Negra” as descriptive of Salvador and the central idea that went along with it: Bahia was the seat of the highest legitimate authority on African-Brazilian religious expression due to its recent close cultural links with West Africa. In City of Women, 17, Landes reported that “one prominent negro woman even called the city the ‘Negro Rome.’” This woman was presumably Aninha, as Carneiro was one of Landes’s principal informants. See also Lima, “Roma Negra,” Diário de Notícias, 10 October 1960, in which Lima suggests that Aninha was “in the habit of calling Bahia” the Black Rome, although Lima implies this information came from a conversation Aninha had with North American researcher Donald Pierson. Pierson interviewed Aninha and put her forward as a vigorous defender of African-Bahian religious expression but does not mention her in connection with the phrase “Black Rome”; see Negroes in Brazil, 292–94. Interestingly, the notion of Bahia as the Black Rome was circulating in the francophone world in the 1920s, particularly among those interested in African culture, as suggested by Paul Morand’s brief reference to Bahia as the “Rome noire” in his 1928 “ParisTombouctou ” travel log, in Morand, Oeuvres, 20. 3. My use of “discourse” here owes much to cultural theorists. Discourse emphasizes the ways that spoken and written language—and the beliefs, values, categories, and common sense or understood experiences that lie within that language—emerge and exist as groupings of statements within a context of social relations and influence thinking and action that in turn affects those relations. See MacDonnel, Theories of Discourse, for a discussion of the development of scholarly uses of discourse. 4. Reis, “Tambores e temores,” 142. 246 · Notes to Pages 3–6 5. It is possible to find cultural politics in most scholarship on people of African descent in Bahia prior to 1889. A sampling of recent work that approaches such dynamics most explicitly includes Lara, “Significados cruzados”; Reis, “Tambores e temores”; Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil; Reis, Death Is a Festival; Reis, Domingos Sodré; Santos, “Divertimentos estrondosos”; Harding, Refuge in Thunder, chaps. 7 and 8; Reis and Silva, Negociação e conflito; Nishida, Slavery and Identity; and Graden, Slavery to Freedom. 6. Bahia, 17 March 1911, quoted in Bacelar, Hierarquia das raças, 50. 7. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won, 175–89; Schwarcz, Espetáculo das raças, esp. 202–17; Borges, “Puffy, Ugly, Slothful, Inert”; and Borges, Family in Bahia. Romo’s Brazil’s Living Museum, chap. 1, provides an important reassessment of the complex positions of the medical profession on race and social reform. Some physicians questioned racial determinism more thoroughly than did the rest of Bahia’s dominant class. 8. On the repression of Candomblé under Police Chief Pedro de Azevedo Gordilho, see Lühning, “Acabe com este santo.” 9. Quoted in Vianna, Festas de santos, 19. 10. Ferreira Filho, “Desafricanizar as ruas”; Albuquerque, “Santos, Deuses e Heróis nas ruas,” 103–6. On Bahian jurisprudence and African ancestry in the 1920s, see Faria, “Festa das Cadernetas.” On the “mulher de saião,” see Peixoto, Breviário da Bahia, quoted in Ferreira Filho, “Desafricanizar as ruas,” 246n16. 11. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won, 177–89; Fry, Carrara, and Martins-Costa, “Negros e brancos,” 252–60. 12. On the early modernists, see Alves, Arco e Flexa; and Silva, Âncoras de tradição, 91–92. 13. A contributor to A Tarde, 24 August 1929, quoted in Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won, 188. See also Lühning, “Acabe com este santo,” 204. 14. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won, 180–81; Vieira Filho, “Africaniza...