The Place of Brazil in the Black Atlantic

Abstract

We have seen that it takes more than African descent and being discriminated against to make people become black or Afro-Brazilian in their own account. In this case it takes more than two to tango. We have also seen that there can be blackness without (black) community or black culture of the traditional sort. In several parts of this book we have noticed how arbitrary the use of the terms "black" and "white" can be and how difficult is to define what is actually black. In Brazil every time we use the term black in any prediscursive way we are in fact naturalizing and fixing a difference that, however important to people's life, is processual rather than simply "there." Throughout this book I have tried to pay attention to the tension between the local and the global and those aspects that, in the case of black populations , have traditionally been similar throughout the Black Atlantic-that which Paul Gilroy (1993) has brilliantly called "the changing same." My research has been grounded in qualitative research in the region of Salvador, Bahia, but it has also tried to benefit from comparison with Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, and, with a good degree of abstraction and from quite a distance, race relations in the United States. Observations made here about race relations in this specific region might be helpful in increasing our knowledge about race relations in Brazil as a whole. My arguments and observations of the Bahian racial system have hinged upon four postulates: that ethnic and racial formations are defined in the interplay between local context and a transAtlantic circuit of ideas, categories, hierarchies, and black objects; that black cultures have developed within all stages of modernity; that Brazilians of African descent have created at different stages and through a variety of means their own Africa; and that the way different categories of outsiders (travelers, essay writers, ethnographers, tourists) have looked at Afro-Brazilians and their cultural production has