Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil by Christen A. Smith documents the epidemic levels of anti-black violence in Brazil and breaks new ground in scholarship on this important, yet long-neglected, topic. This book is also a welcome addition to the growing academic literature on race and racism in Brazil. In recent years, there has been an upsurge in research on Brazilian racial dynamics, particularly among anthropologists. Smith is part of a new cadre of scholars whose work probes the complexities of anti-black racism in Brazil by giving careful regard to institutional and structural forms of racial discrimination. Similarly to Keisha-Khan Perry's recent book, Black Women against the Land Grab (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Smith's research highlights the violence inherent in Brazilian racism in the city of Salvador, Bahia, a site that has long been unproblematically romanticised as the most ‘black’ city in Brazil, in both popular and academic discourses.
In this well-written and persuasively argued book, Smith analyses pervasive practices of anti-black violence in Salvador through the lens of performance. She highlights how police homicides of black Brazilians and death squads form part of the landscape of the city of Salvador. By using the term ‘Afro-Paradise’ as both a descriptor of and metaphor for the city of Salvador, Smith argues that ‘Bahia as a space of black fantasy and Bahia as a space of death for black people are two sides of the same coin. Afro-paradise is a choreographed, theatrical performance between the state's celebration of black culture and the state's routine killing of the black body’ (p. 3). By placing celebratory views of black culture in conversation with anti-black violence, Smith disrupts the notion that majority-black cities, such as Salvador, are exceptions to broader racist practices. In fact, Afro-Paradise demonstrates how anti-black violence, and its lethal consequences, is often heightened in precisely the spaces where blackness is celebrated in official discourses.
The performance-based approach used in Afro-Paradise seeks to challenge the tendency to disassociate black culture from black people and to dehistoricise blackness (p. 13). Instead, Smith uses performance and the ‘performative aspects of gender/sexuality’ to ‘recorporealize blackness’ (p. 13). Importantly, she argues that police violence is performed on black bodies and such performances also produce blackness. Smith places performance in conversation with ethnography and history, adopting a two-pronged approach to performance in the book: one aspect of her analysis focuses on performances by a group known as Culture Shock, and the other aspect focuses on state performances of anti-black violence. Culture Shock was founded in Salvador in 1994 and has a style that combines aspects of Brechtian theatre with influences from Augusto Boal and hip-hop. The book is organised around five interludes which precede each chapter of the book. Most of the interludes contain narrative excerpts from Culture Shock's play Stop to Think (Para Para Pensar). Using the play to frame the book's key themes and concepts, Smith foregrounds quotidian understandings of state terror that have been developed by members of Culture Shock, as well as the peripheral, black communities for which they perform. As Smith notes, by ‘reenacting things like police violence (police raids, racial profiling) on stage in conversation with a discussion of the mundane, banal, and everyday manifestations of racism in the lives of black residents, Stop to Think uses the real as a referent for reaching its audience’ (p. 37).
Although Smith uses the play Stop to Think to frame the book's analysis of anti-black state violence, she also delves into the long history of anti-black violence in Brazil. She provocatively argues that, far from being an aberration, anti-black violence is constitutive of modernity and nationhood in Brazil. For Smith, ‘the tortured black body is the oppositional point against which Brazilian modernity articulates itself, and therefore the birthplace of the nation’ (p. 65). Smith's discussion of the Pelourinho in Chapter 1 of the book makes particularly insightful links between Brazil's past and present. The Pelourinho is a historical neighbourhood in Salvador where the first slave market in the Americas was located and where enslaved Africans were whipped. In fact, the name translates into ‘pillory’ in English. The Pelourinho has also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. By exploring the Pelourinho's history from the vantage point of anti-black violence, Smith highlights how it continues to function as a site and symbol of the black body in pain, although – or perhaps because – it has become a popular tourist destination. Throughout Afro-Paradise, Smith calls attention to how ongoing performances of conquest, colonisation and slavery continue into the twenty-first century. In so doing, Afro-Paradise highlights the deep entrenchment of anti-black racism and violence in local and national contexts in which blackness is both hypervisible and invisible.
While Smith began the research for Afro-Paradise in the early 2000s, the book's publication in 2016 coincided with intense mobilisation in the United States and globally by the Movement for Black Lives, as police killings of African Americans in the United States became a nearly daily occurrence. This broader, transnational context of anti-black violence highlights the significance and resonance of Afro-Paradise beyond Brazil, as Smith notes at several points in the book. At the same time, the rich and nuanced ethnographic detail provided in the book underscores the particularities of state violence perpetrated against black communities in Brazil. Afro-Paradise is a sobering analysis of longstanding and ubiquitous practices of state terror and genocide, practices that have become more common with the shift away from democracy in Brazil in recent years.
In Afro-Paradise, Smith does the important work of challenging Brazil's image as a racial democracy through highlighting ongoing practices of anti-black racism and violence. This study goes beyond previous research on racial discrimination in Brazil by forcefully arguing for the impossibility of black citizenship, and by extension racial equality, in contemporary Brazil. This study will be of interest to students and scholars in performance studies, anthropology, African diaspora studies, Brazilian studies, and violence studies.
