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Writing Bahian Identity: Crafting New Narratives of Blackness in Salvador, Brazil, 1940s–1950s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2018

Abstract

This article studies the intersections between race and regional identity in the 1940s and 1950s in Salvador, Bahia, a critical site for the African diaspora. It examines how tourist guides produced for domestic consumption, first by Jorge Amado and later by intellectuals Odorico Tavares and José Valladares, sought to frame the city in new ways around blackness. Grounding the production of such guides in national trends for mobility and travel, the article proposes that they provided a foundational site for the crafting of a regional identity. Critically, these texts established early links between a commodified black culture and tourism in ways that would prove exceptionally long-lasting.

Spanish abstract

Este artículo estudia las intersecciones entre raza e identidad regional en los años 1940 y 1950 en Salvador, Bahía, un sitio crítico para la diáspora africana. Examina cómo una serie de guías turísticas producidas para el consumo doméstico, primero por Jorge Amado y luego por los intelectuales Odorico Tavares y José Valladares, buscaron enmarcar a la ciudad de maneras distintas centradas en el concepto de negritud. Situando la producción de dichas guías dentro de las tendencias nacionales de movilidad y viajes, el artículo propone que estas se convirtieron en un instrumento fundacional para la configuración de una identidad regional. Más importante aun, estos textos establecieron vínculos tempranos entre una cultura negra mercantilizada y el turismo, de maneras que probarían ser de larga duración.

Portuguese abstract

Este artigo estuda as intersecções entre raça e identidade regional durante os anos 40 e 50 em Salvador, na Bahia, local crucial para a diáspora Africana. Também examina como guias turísticos feitos para o consumo doméstico – primeiro por Jorge Amado e mais tarde pelos intelectuais Odorico Tavares e José Valladares – procuraram enquadrar a cidade de maneiras distintas centradas no conceito da negritude. Baseando a produção desses guias dentro das tendências nacionais de mobilidade e viagem, o artigo propõe que eles se tornaram num instrumento constitutivo para a configuração de uma identidade regional. Esses textos foram essenciais em estabelecer as primeiras conexões entre uma cultura negra mercantilizada e o turismo, de maneiras que iriam se mostrar excepcionalmente duradouras.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

This work has benefitted from many careful readings that have strengthened it, especially those by Jane Mangan, Teresa Van Hoy, Angie Murphy, José Carlos de la Puente and the anonymous readers for JLAS. I wish to further thank Scott Ickes for his insightful comments on multiple drafts and for his exceptional collegiality and support. In addition, I received valuable feedback from presenting my work to colleagues at Davidson College, the Swinney Seminar at Texas State University, and a panel at the meeting of the American Historical Association in 2015, especially Hendrik Kraay and Mary Ann Mahoney. Funding from the Texas State University Research Enhancement Award enabled much of the work for this article; a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities has allowed time for significant revisions.

References

1 Amado, Jorge, Bahia de Todos os Santos: Guia das ruas e dos mistérios da Cidade do Salvador (Bahia: Editora Martins, 1945), pp. 15, 17Google Scholar. The atabaque is a large hand drum used in ceremonies of Candomblé, an African-based Brazilian religion with strong roots in Bahia.

2 Jorge Amado's novels have been translated into 39 languages; he dominated, by far, the Brazilian literary market in the twentieth century until the rise of Paulo Coelho in the 1980s. Criticism of his work is abundant; for an introduction, see Chamberlain, Bobby J., Jorge Amado (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1990)Google Scholar.

3 Amado used the term ‘negro’. I use the terms ‘black’, ‘Afro-Brazilian’ or ‘Afro-Bahian’ here to refer more generally to African descendants. Although this may sometimes obscure distinctions that can be important, it also aims to recognise that, in general, life chances and opportunities in Brazil fall most often along a binary system based on white and non-white. Within quotes identifications are used here as reported. In Brazil the name Bahia is often used interchangeably with Salvador, usage that I follow here as well. When I refer to the state of Bahia I have tried to make that clear.

4 The intersection between tourist guides of the era and their visual content is the focus of my work in progress, but I put it aside here for reasons of space.

5 A good survey is found in Appelbaum, Nancy, Macpherson, Anne S. and Rosenblatt, Karin Alejandra (eds.), Race and Region in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Within Brazil this period was in fact central for the crafting of regional identities more broadly. See especially Weinstein, Barbara, The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; de Albuquerque Júnior, Durval Muniz, A invenção do nordeste e outras artes (Recife: Massangá, 1999)Google Scholar; Blake, Stanley, The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality: Race and Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Courtney J. Campbell, ‘The Brazilian Northeast, Inside Out: Region, Nation, and Globalization (1926–1968)’, PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2014.

6 For cultural politics and regional identity in Bahia during this era see: Ickes, Scott, African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; , Ickes, ‘Salvador's Modernizador Cultural: Odorico Tavares and the Aesthetics of Baianidade, 1945–1955’, The Americas, 69: 4 (2013), pp. 437–66Google Scholar; Pinho, Osmundo, ‘A Bahia no fundamental: Notas para uma interpretação do discurso ideológico da baianidade’, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, 13: 36 (Feb. 1998), pp. 109–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Risério, Antônio, História da cidade da Bahia (Rio de Janeiro: Versal, 2004)Google Scholar; Sansi, Roger, Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007)Google Scholar; and Romo, Anadelia A., Brazil's Living Museum: Race, Reform and Tradition in Bahia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)Google Scholar. For changing ideas of race in Salvador over the twentieth century, see the above as well as Bacelar, Jeferson, A hierarquia das raças: Negros e brancos em Salvador (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 2001)Google Scholar; Alberto, Paulina L., Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pinho, Patricia, Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Butler, Kim D., Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

7 Romo, Brazil's Living Museum.

8 Pinho, Mama Africa. Williams, Erica examines how contemporary cultural commodification in Salvador has crafted erotic encounters with black females as part of the city's appeal in Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

9 Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture; Butler, Freedoms Given; Alberto, Terms of Inclusion.

10 Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments.

11 Dunn, Christopher, Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), chap. 3Google Scholar.

12 Collins, John F., Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Butler, Freedoms Given; Perry, Keisha-Khan, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Collins, Revolt of the Saints; and Smith, Christen A., Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

14 There is a broad literature, but see, especially, de Albuquerque, Wlamyra Ribeiro, Algazarra nas ruas: Comemorações da independência na Bahia, 1889–1923 (Campinas: UNICAMP, 1999)Google Scholar; Braga, Julio, Na gamela do feitiço: Repressão e resistência nos candomblés da Bahia (Salvador: EDUFBA/CEAO, 1995)Google Scholar.

15 This followed the trends of Latin America more broadly: see Andrews, George Reid, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar and Wade, Peter, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd edn (London: Pluto Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Brazil, see Borges, Dain, ‘The Recognition of Afro-Brazilian Symbols and Ideas, 1890–1940’, Luso-Brazilian Review, 32: 2 (1995), pp. 5978Google Scholar; Skidmore, Thomas E., Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, 2nd edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Vianna, Hermano, The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

16 Sampaio, Lauro, Indicador e guia prático da cidade do Salvador-Bahia (Bahia: Barboza, 1928)Google Scholar.

17 Dunn, Contracultura, chap. 3.

18 It is not my intention here to enter into a spatial analysis of the city, but to highlight that ideas of space change over time and are socially constructed. For recent insights on the question, see Courtney J. Campbell, ‘Space, Place and Scale: Human Geography and Spatial History in Past and Present’, Past and Present (May 2016); doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw006.

19 See for example Dantas, Beatriz Góis, Vovó Nagô e papai branco: Usos e abusos de África no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1988)Google Scholar; Matory, J. Lorand, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Capone, Stefania, A busca da África no candomblé: Tradição e poder no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa Livraria, 2004)Google Scholar.

20 There is no available evidence to suggest that the organisers of the Congress had tourism in mind. Amado, however, did participate in the Congress and it may well have helped consolidate his vision of Salvador as a black city, though such ideas were still in flux then. See Romo, Brazil's Living Museum, pp. 47–85.

21 For a consideration of key anthropologists, see ibid., pp. 113–32.

22 On the poem, see Pinho, Patricia, ‘Gilberto Freyre e a Baianidade’, in Lund, Joshua and McNee, Malcolm (eds.), Gilberto Freyre e os estudos latino-americanos (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2006), pp. 227–54Google Scholar. The best intellectual biography of Freyre is Burke, Peter and Pallares-Burke, Maria Lúcia, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008)Google Scholar.

23 Indeed, though UNESCO scholars would come to critique ideas of racial democracy in São Paulo and Rio, they were largely reinforced for Bahia. Maio, Marcos Chor, ‘UNESCO and the Study of Race Relations in Brazil: Regional or National Issue?’, Latin American Research Review, 36: 2 (2001), pp. 118–36Google ScholarPubMed; and Romo, Brazil's Living Museum, pp. 133–50.

24 Ickes, ‘Salvador's Modernizador Cultural’.

25 Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture.

26 Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments.

27 Collins, Revolt of the Saints, pp. 124–33; 9.

28 Rebecca Herman Weber, ‘In Defense of Sovereignty: Labor, Crime, Sex and Nation at U.S. Military Bases in Latin America, 1940–1947’, PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014.

29 Tota, Antonio Pedro treats both Carmen Miranda and Disney insightfully in The Seduction of Brazil: The Americanization of Brazil during World War II (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009), pp. 84–7Google Scholar.

30 Historical travel statistics have yet to be analysed by scholars. I have relied here on my own analysis of Brazil's Anuário Estatístico (hereafter cited as AE). The years 1960–80 also show growth; however, clearly the roots are earlier.

31 Berger, Dina, The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pérez, Louis A., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 167Google Scholar. Cuba's influx would almost double by 1960: ibid.

32 1950, for example, brought 6,000 North American tourists to Brazil, the second largest national contingent: AE 1953, p. 80. Argentina sent the largest numbers, but again, totals remained small.

33 Equally, for the contemporary period (Diegues’ focus) domestic tourism is much more important than international tourism, but still difficult to quantify. See ‘Regional and Domestic Mass Tourism in Brazil: An Overview’, in Krishna B. Ghimire (ed.), The Native Tourist: Mass Tourism within Developing Countries (London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan Publications, 2001), pp. 57–8.

34 The number of Brazilian airlines increased from 12 to 21: AE 1951, p. 194. Trip figures are my calculations from AE 1958, p. 153. Schwartz, Rosalie links the inauguration of flights to Brazil in the early 1930s with Hollywood promotions in Flying Down to Rio: Hollywood, Tourists, and Yankee Clippers (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), pp. 247–57Google Scholar.

35 AE 1951, p. 196; AE 1958, p. 154.

36 Official statistics did not differentiate between local, regional and long-distance bus lines; however, service from the southeast was probably in place by the 1950s.

37 Wolfe, Joel, Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

38 Lúcia Aquino de Queiroz, ‘Gestão pública e a competitividade de cidades turísticas: A experiência da cidade do Salvador’, PhD diss., Universitat de Barcelona, 2005, p. 332.

39 AE 1948, p. 182.

40 Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture, esp. pp. 208–9. Lauro Sampaio's 1928 guide (Indicador e guia prático) wondered why there was no tourism in Bahia. Historians have pointed to the importance of tourism in Salvador, but its early development remains blurry. For these early roots see Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture; Ickes, ‘Salvador's Modernizador Cultural’; and Miriam Elizabeth Riggs, ‘“There's Room for Everyone”: Tourism and Tradition in Salvador's Historic District, 1930 to the Present’, PhD diss., UCSD, 2008. Queiroz outlines official efforts in terms of timing and structure in ‘Gestão pública’.

41 AE 1949, p. 541. By 1966, Salvador counted 67 hotels and pensions, but there is little data for the years in between: AE 1967, p. 280.

42 Queiroz, ‘Gestão pública’, p. 313.

43 From 1950 to 1960 hotel revenues for Brazil increased 540 percent, but 870 percent in Bahia and only 297 percent for the city of Rio: AE 1965, p. 230.

44 Figures from 1959, Queiroz, ‘Gestão pública’, p. 332.

45 The reasons for this are not clear, although it may well have been that domestic and regional tourism was significant enough, and autonomous enough, that attracting international tourism appeared less pressing at the federal level.

46 My own survey of US travel journalism of the 1950s uncovered little to no evidence of Brazilian travel promotion sponsored by government entities. For instance, my searches in the Washington Post revealed six advertisements for travel to Brazil in 1952; this was the most for any one year in the decade and all were sponsored by US airline or steamship companies.

47 Queiroz, ‘Gestão pública’, pp. 301–37.

48 Ibid., pp. 314–27. Embratur, the more active federal office for tourism, was established in 1966.

49 This emphasis is evident in a short-lived magazine published in English in 1941 and 1942 during the Vargas era. See Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda (Department of Press and Propaganda, DIP), Travel in Brazil, vol. 1, nos. 1–4 (Rio de Janeiro: DIP, 1941).

50 I have not found comparable efforts by a region to attract domestic tourism in other parts of Brazil, nor am I aware yet of any body of comparable guides in the rest of Latin America. More research is certainly needed.

51 Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Histories of tourism are still sparse for Latin America; for a recent sampling see: Berger, Dina and Wood, Andrew Grant (eds.), Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Merrill, Dennis, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ward, Evan R., Packaged Vacations: Tourism Development in the Spanish Caribbean (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Insightfully, he labels these works ‘guides to baianidade’: Pinho, ‘A Bahia no fundamental’.

54 Riggs, ‘There's Room for Everyone’. Riggs’ rich study examines debates over the Pelourinho and concentrates especially on the 1970s.

55 Ickes, African-Brazilian Culture, esp. pp. 223–5; Ickes, ‘Salvador's Modernizador Cultural’. In addition, the work of dos Santos, Jocélio Teles, O poder da cultura e a cultura no poder: A disputa simbólica da herança cultural negra no Brasil (Salvador: EDUFBA, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pays close attention to state promotional material for tourism, but for the latter decades of the 1960s and 1970s.

56 Freyre, Gilberto, Guia prático, histórico e sentimental da cidade do Recife, 2nd edn (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1942)Google Scholar.

57 This provided an exception to what he claimed as a general reluctance to reread his own work, further indication that the text deserves treatment as essential to his oeuvre. Despite its very idiosyncratic nature as a text, scholars have oddly accepted its success without much question.

58 Chamberlain, Jorge Amado, p. 6. After brief imprisonment in Rio in 1942, he was conditionally released to Salvador with the understanding that he was to remain there.

59 Undated manuscript drafts, Archive of the Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado. I am grateful to generous assistance from Bruno Fraga, of the Fundação, who provided me with this information.

60 Hallewell, Laurence, O livro no Brasil: Sua história, 2nd edn (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2005), pp. 502–3Google Scholar, 513–15.

61 Ibid., p. 507.

62 For an insightful urban studies perspective, see Osnildo Adão Wan-Dall Junior, ‘Das narrativas literárias de cidades: Experiência urbana através do guia de ruas e mistérios da Bahia de Todos os Santos’, MA thesis, Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2013.

63 Critics generally date this second approach to his 1958 novel Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, though some, like Chamberlain, propose more continuity in his works (Jorge Amado, pp. 97–103).

64 Bahian food became a symbol of Brazil's African connections in the 1920s and 1930s: Pinho, Mama Africa, pp. 187–90.

65 Amado does often speak directly to his reader throughout the text; however, it is not clear whether he is addressing the same young girl.

66 See Dunn, Contracultura, pp. 34, 108, chap. 3.

67 Collins too notes that the trope of mystery has been dominant in Salvador: Revolt of the Saints, pp. 222–34.

68 The invitation to a young girl (moça) to mysterious dark streets certainly reads as sexualised, yet overall the ribald sexuality of his later oeuvre is surprisingly absent from the guide.

69 Williams, Daryle, Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Amado, Bahia, p. 26.

71 I should highlight that Amado had defined Salvador as a black city in his fiction for some time, but less consistently. Jubiabá (1935), the early novel where he ostensibly most celebrated Afro-Bahian life in Salvador, referred often to the ‘black city’, but also alternated other formulations: Jubiabá, trans. Margaret A. Neves (New York: Avon Books, 1984), pp. 52, 62, 84.

72 Bahia, p. 26. Amado elsewhere used the terms ‘Black Rome’ (p. 31), as well as ‘mestiço city’ (p. 39).

73 The term terreiro refers most literally to a yard, or space, but also indicates the space of worship for a particular Candomblé.

74 Zweig, Stefan, Brazil: Land of the Future (New York: Viking Press, 1941), p. 266Google Scholar.

75 Amado, Bahia, p. 163.

76 Ibid., p. 98.

77 Ibid., p. 22.

78 Ibid., pp. 84–5. For the racialised policies aimed at infant mortality, see Otovo, Okezi, Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850–1945 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

79 Amado, Bahia, p. 17.

80 Courtney J. Campbell emphasises that racial discourse in Brazil depended on audience. See ‘Four Fishermen, Orson Welles, and the Making of the Brazilian Northeast’, Past and Present, 234: 1 (2017), pp. 173–212.

81 Roger Sansi, Fetishes and Monuments; Ickes, ‘Salvador's Modernizador Cultural’.

82 African-Brazilian Culture. I build here especially on the work of Ickes, ‘Salvador's Modernizador Cultural’, which examines this text within Tavares’ larger role in a budding regional modernism (p. 459); though we agree on his importance, my interpretation views the inclusionary nature of Tavares as more restricted than does that of Ickes and probes further into the texts’ connections with other guides. Tavares was born in Pernambuco, relocating to Bahia in 1941, in his mid-twenties.

83 For more on Valladares, see Romo, Brazil's Living Museum, pp. 86–112.

84 Tavares, Odorico, Bahia, imagens da terra e do povo, 2nd edn (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1951), p. 12Google Scholar. He frequently drew upon texts written previously (Ickes, ‘Salvador's Modernizador Cultural’, p. 454).

85 Tavares, Bahia, p. 11.

86 Ickes highlights his interest in authenticity and the ‘povo’ in ‘Salvador's Modernizador Cultural’, pp. 440, 451–4, 458. The Canudos rebellion (1896–7) pitted an impoverished religious community in the Sertaõ (backlands) of Bahia against the federal army.

87 Ickes notes that Amado was a fan of Tavares: ‘Salvador's Modernizador Cultural’, p. 465.

88 Tavares, Bahia, p. 26.

89 Ibid., p. 17.

90 Ibid., p. 18. See also Ickes, ‘Salvador's Modernizador Cultural’.

91 Ibid., p. 23; my emphasis.

92 Ibid., p. 161.

93 In thinking about blackness as picturesque, Valladares may well have been influenced by artists such as Carybé. I treat this artistic movement further in my work in progress.

94 Valladares, José, Bêabá da Bahia: Guia turístico, 2nd edn (Salvador: EDUFBA, [1951] 2012), pp. 3740CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 Ibid., p. 37.

96 Final ellipsis in the original. Ibid., p. 79.

97 Vianna, Mystery of Samba. The idea of intellectuals as cultural mediators, a theory detailed by Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Velho and used by Vianna for these samba interlocutors, seems intriguing here. The power dynamic, however, may be considerably more uneven, and it is not entirely clear how close to the ‘povo’ these intellectuals truly were.

98 Weinstein, Color of Modernity, pp. 6–9.