Scott Ickes has produced an important book that adds significantly to understandings of regional identity in Bahia in the twentieth century as well as the cultural and racial politics of Brazil. With his close analysis of Salvador's busy calendar of public rituals and festivities, he provides insight into a central question that has driven much of the recent scholarship about identity in Bahia: how and when did Afro-Bahian culture come to be seen as central to the region (Alberto, Pinho, Romo)?
Focusing on the critical period from 1930 to 1954, Ickes argues that religious and secular celebrations became a central arena for debate about Bahian identity and the role of African-based cultural contributions such as Candomblé. His work reveals how Bahia's working class, most of whom claimed African descent, pushed for expanded acceptance and inclusion in the city's festivals beginning in the early 1930s. Building important alliances with government officials and intellectuals, these actors succeeded by the early 1950s in constructing a more inclusive vision of Bahian identity. In the process they carved out a central role for themselves in the city's public life.
Ickes finds that the populist leanings of the federal interventor Juracy Magalhães established an important foundation during the 1930s for the acceptance of Afro-Bahian culture and identity. Chapter 2 sheds new light on this understudied period of Bahian politics, stressing the possibilities ushered in by a politician working outside the traditional system of Bahian elite power. The next three chapters examine popular celebrations in some detail. Despite a decline in public festivals in the first years of the decade, the later 1930s and the 1940s witnessed a revival in their frequency and importance. Chapter 3 is rich with description that shows this revival took a very specific course, as festivals increasingly included celebration of Candomblé deities.
Chapter 4 turns to elite support for this process, and explores the role played by sympathetic journalists as well as select government officials within the Estado Novo regime. Ickes argues that both groups tried to shape and control the proceedings. At the same time, elites began to turn away from favoring prohibitions or denouncements of elements of black culture, but although they worked for broader visions of Bahian identity, there were significant limits to their notions of inclusion, as Ickes demonstrates. The contests for elite control are continued in chapter 5, where Ickes provides fresh insight on the history of how celebrations of Bahia's carnival became metaphorically and literally decentered.
The 1940s witnessed a brief flourishing of neighborhood batucadas, or percussion groups, which ushered in a new period of inclusiveness for black culture in Bahia's carnival, paving ground for its later transformations. In his final chapters Ickes takes up the question of how tourism, Bahia's modernist movement, and the transformations of the 1950s worked to consolidate shifts in Bahian identity that had been building over the previous two decades. Ickes demonstrates convincingly that public rituals and celebrations are central to any understanding of modern Bahia, and his analysis provides a critical addition to the debate about the nature and limits of Bahia's embrace of its African heritage. His nuanced and wide-ranging understanding of the material occasionally results in a level of detail that obscures his insights; yet this is largely a matter of style rather than substance, and Ickes’ meticulous research is apparent throughout.
This study provides critical attention and fresh perspective to a foundational period in Bahia's self-fashioning. As Ickes reveals, carefully crafted images of a festive Bahia, with Salvador as the center of Brazil's black religiosity, continue to define the state today.
