Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition Sao Paulo and Salvador (review)

Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador. By KIM D. BUTLER. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Illustrations. Map. Tables. Figures. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 285 pp. Cloth, $52.00. Paper, $22.00.

Kim D. Butler's monograph, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won, has much to offer scholars of both Brazilian history and the African diasporan experience in the New World. In examining the post-Abolition period from 1888 to 1938 in the cities of São Paulo and Salvador, Butler presents an analysis of the distinct strategies and options deployed by Afro-Brazilians who faced the challenge of shaping their transition to freedom in unique ways. The author deftly connects the widely varying collective activities of Afro-Brazilians in these two cities by viewing them within a theoretical framework of responses to postslavery conditions. By defining this framework as a continuum of integrationist, alternative integrationist, or separatist responses, Butler is able to view both the emergence of the political activism of the Frente Negra Brasileira in São Paulo as well as the struggle for religious freedom for candomblés in Salvador as manifestations of distinct but linked struggles for self-determination in Brazil.

The author examines the diverse structural and individual influences shaping Afro-Brazilian responses in each city. Her observations are enlightening from several standpoints. First, she is able to explain why, even though the majority of the inhabitants of Salvador were Afro-Brazilians, they did not organize any effective political organizations such as the Frente Negra Brasileira in São Paulo. Butler observes that in São Paulo, where waves of European immigrants left Afro-Brazilians in a small minority, discrimination led to the development of a phenotypically defined consciousness of "blackness," which in turn nurtured group solidarity and a community of activists proud of their negritude. In contrast, ethnic consciousness (rather than racial consciousness) remained strong in Salvador and the civil right to assert and maintain an African heritage, religion, and culture became the subject of advocacy, struggle, and collective action there. Butler effectively valorizes the struggle for religious freedom and cultural autonomy in Salvador in this period as a significant manifestation of a separatist expression of self-determination. In doing so, Butler calls to our attention the vitally important role of Afro-Brazilian women who were the founding mothers of the candomblés and who maintained leadership roles in the Afro-Brazilian religious world. She also notes that while the Frente Negra was, in the end, a very short-lived phenomenon in São Paulo, Afro-Bahians effectively conquered cultural space in Salvador such that Afro-Brazilian religion thrives there and elsewhere in Brazil today.

Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won makes a strong contribution to a period of Afro-Brazilian history that has been relatively neglected, given the greater emphasis in the historiography on the centuries-long era of slavery in Brazil. Butler's work is therefore noteworthy for this reason alone, but it has other important attributes as well. The author's theoretical framework is intended to be useful to all scholars of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora, and in her conclusion she ably connects the case studies of Salvador and São Paulo to the Afro-Cuban experience, and to the post abolition experiences in Jamaica. In this respect, the monograph addresses a hemispheric audience and can be useful to both scholars and teachers of comparative history.

Kathleen J. Higgins, Independent Scholar

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