In light of Africa : globalising blackness in northeast Brazil

Africa, as both a place and as an idea, looms large in the construction of Black identity in Brazil and plays an increasingly important role in the identity processes of many Afro-American societies. Consequently, this dissertation seeks to explore how the idea of Africa is used and manipulated in the discourse and formulation of Blackness in the northeastern Brazilian state Bahia. Today, Afro-Brazilian elites and academics---particularly anthropologists---privilege the cultures of the Bight of Benin as crucial markers of a new Black identity in Black Bahia's religious spaces, cultural institutions and social movements. This new form of Black identity seeks to reject the dominant ideology of 'racial democracy' in Brazil and replace it with one that articulates an Africanised approach to Blackness. In this model, Yoruba religious practices are emphasised and placed at the centre of an array of cultural forms including carnaval, Afro-Brazilian religion, language instruction, culinary practice and the remnant maroon communities of the Bahian interior. In analysing these movements, the present work eschews the need to define Afro-Brazilian cultural practices in the historical context of a plantation society that contained so-called 'survivals' of African culture. Rather, this work adopts a perspective that simply attempts to understand how ideas such as 'Africa', 'slave', 'roots', 'orixa', 'Yoruba' and other, similar African concepts are deployed in the creation of Bahian, and more generally, Brazilian Blackness. Further, the construction of Africanised Blackness in Bahia needs to be understood in the context of an ongoing live dialogue between the cultures and peoples of Afro-America and different regions of the African continent. This dissertation explores this dialogue and also investigates the extent to which these redefinitions actually resonate and penetrate the diverse Black populations of Bahia, including those that are not actively involved with Bahia's Black movements, such as evangelical Christians and residents of the impoverished Bahian interior---the sertao.Keywords: Africa, Bahia, Blackness, Brazil, dialogue, elites, ethnography, identity, Yoruba