Kwame Dixon's book provides both a survey of the struggle for racial justice in Brazil and a cogent analysis of the specific struggles in Salvador, Bahia. Based on diaspora theory, current scholarship on Brazil's African diaspora, and extensive field work and interviews with activists, the author examines the mechanisms through which white supremacy was built and maintained and the ways in which Afro Brazilians have contested its premises and effects and, in so doing, reconfigured Afro-civil society in a city with a majority black population. Salvador da Bahia, touted as a “Black Rome,” has been ruled by white elites. Along the way, Dixon inquires into black cultural organizations, education, and formal politics and identifies black movements and organizations that laid the ground for resurgent activism following dictatorship. He also looks at how more recent activists have reinterpreted the struggle for racial justice.
Dixon's discussion of culture focuses on Salvador's blocos afros (Black carnaval groups), which draw inspiration from early twentieth-century African clubs and other black organizations and engage contemporary “circuits of transnational Afro-Diasporic cultures and consciousness” (44). Among the best known clubs is Ilê Aiyê, founded in 1974, with its African-influenced dress and repertoire and membership exclusive to dark-skinned Brazilians and its direct challenge to racial hierarchies. Another, Olodum, founded in 1979, “reaffirms Black identity within a broad multicultural framework” (49), and redefines representations of marginality within public space.
As they participated in a re-Africanization of carnaval that re-centered the black body in contestatory ways, blocos also invested in education to challenge discourses of racial democracy that foreclose on denunciations of racial inequality as an affront to national identity. Yet, as Dixon skillfully argues, blocos also have to navigate the thorny terrain of gentrification, corporate sponsorship, and the commodification of diasporic culture. Today, they continue to work through answers to the question of how to defend counter-hegemonic values.
Dixon's discussion of education surveys the development of policies at the national level and connects this history to educational practices in Salvador. At the end of the twentieth century, Afro centered groups in civil society succeeded in taking the fight for racial equality from antidiscrimination to affirmative action, which included a federal scholarship program, admission quotas at several universities, and later federally mandated phased-in admissions quotas of 50 percent of seats at federal universities for black, brown, indigenous, and public high school students. Affirmed by the Brazilian supreme court, the Law of Social Quotas (2012), as Dixon explains, counteracts the structural inequality of an educational system in which students from poorly funded public primary and secondary schools are left out of internationally ranked public universities filled with students who graduate from private schools and take specialized courses to prepare for entrance exams. In Salvador, affirmative action extends to pioneering admissions reform at a state university and programs that provide exam preparation for black students, including those of the Steve Biko Cultural Institute, which also educates for citizenship and participation in Afro-civil society with innovative pedagogy and a re-examination of Brazil's history through the lens of Afro-Brazilian experience.
Dixon's book concludes with an evaluation of political currents important to his focus. “[T]hat Blacks in Salvador are close to eighty percent of the population but have not been able to gain a modicum of political power . . .,” he notes, “is confounding to many observers” (127). Black leaders have gained seats on the city council, where they represent a political spectrum that ranges from the Black Evangelical Movement to socialism. Yet, the city has had only one black mayor, Edvaldo de Brito, who was appointed in the 1970s by the military dictatorship. Dixon's engaging analysis of the mayoral election of 1985, in which Brito sought to return to the office, suggests that he lost not only because of lingering public distaste for his earlier alliance with the military, but also because for some black voters his political experience did not outweigh associations of blackness with a lack of preparation for public office; his loss thus exposed, as Afro-civil society groups recognize and debate, the challenge of cultivating consciousness.
Dixon observes that the “cultural power of Blacks thus far has not led to a better socioeconomic situation for the urban masses of Salvador” (153). At the same time, as this book demonstrates, the dimensions and complexity of Afro-civil society have increased and Brazilian politics cannot be understood without reckoning with the critiques, demands, and debates that arise within it. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of the African diaspora and Brazilian politics.
