Book Review

Historical studies of Brazil's population of African descent during the First Republic (1889–1930) have been limited by the striking decline in the number of sources as compared to the records kept during the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889). Soon after Brazil's abolition of slavery in 1888, institutional documents such as birth, marriage, baptism, and death records stopped recording the race of individuals, and officials removed race as a category from Brazil's census in 1900 and 1920. Therefore it has been very difficult to document Afro-Brazilian history during the important post-abolition years.	1
Relying on oral histories as a new source of evidence and a nuanced approach to traditional archival sources, Kim Butler offers an insightful comparative examination of the Afro-Brazilian populations of the southern industrial city of Sao Paulo and the northeastern agricultural city of Salvador, the capital of Bahia. She focuses on these cities during the period of abolition and the decades immediately following to better understand how Afro-Brazilians negotiated their roles in Brazilian society as new citizens in a country redefining the very meaning of citizenship. Excluding Haiti's revolution of 1791–1804, every instance of slavery's abolition in the Americas was defined by the slave-holding class bestowing freedom onto enslaved Africans rather than the enslaved populations asserting their rights and taking their freedom. A dichotomous struggle then ensued between former slaveholders, who defended their privileged position in society by limiting the roles and freedoms of the men and women who so recently had been property, and those same freed persons. Butler writes, "The fundamental problem was that people of African descent viewed abolition as freedom from the oppression they had suffered since colonial times. In contrast, the privileged classes of the Americas perceived abolition as a structural shift that could be prevented from jeopardizing race-based social relations of power. The freedoms given were far more paltry than the freedoms people of African descent hoped to win" (2).	2
In her second chapter, "Self-Determination: The Politics of Identity," Butler sets out the comparative framework that structures this entire work: Although Afro-Brazilians in Sao Paulo and Salvador carried out very different sorts of organization, their actions are part of a single broadly defined political activism. Sao Paulo's black community was notable for its political activism during this period. State-supported European immigration to further rapid "whitening" of Brazil's population led to a hostile and exclusionary white majority in Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo's black community grew tenfold between 1890 and 1940 due to an influx of poor agricultural workers from the rural interiors of the states of Sao Paulo and its neighbors Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. However, the European immigration exceeded this rapid growth and Afro-Brazilians never made up more than 8 to 12 percent of the population. Butler writes that "This became the struggle of Afro-Brazilians in Sao Paulo after abolition as they encountered multiple forms of discrimination against 'black' people. Blacks were not welcomed in certain public spaces, blacks were not hired for certain jobs, blacks could not attend certain parties or live wherever they might like. Although Afro-Paulistas did not originally think of themselves primarily as 'black,' blackness eventually became a shared experience and identity as a result of its role as a basis for exclusion and subordination" (60). Resistance against such racial discrimination created a new collective identity, which in turn led to the foundation of black associations, newspapers, and eventually a political party in the form of the Frete Negra Brasileira (1931–37).	3
Salvador, on the other hand, represented the center of a more authentic African culture in Brazil. Candomblé, capoeira, and Afro-Brazilian carnival blocos were legitimate African religious and cultural traditions that retained authenticity even after the African slave trade ended and Salvador's population shifted from a majority of African-born slaves to one of Brazilian-born free people in the late nineteenth century. As opposed to Sao Paulo, Salvador's population was not greatly affected by immigration in the post-abolition period and there was no large influx of Afro-Brazilians when slavery ended. In short, Salvador lacked the widespread demographic, economic, and social shifts that swept over Sao Paulo. What allows Butler so effectively to analyze these broadly disparate populations is her capacious definition of political activism that includes the assertion and defense of Afro-Brazilian culture, or to be more specific, Afro-Bahian culture.	4
The lens through which she examines the two populations offers striking insights. Butler focuses on the form that racial discrimination took in Sao Paulo and Salvador to describe the response of these Afro-Brazilian populations. "The process of creating diasporan culture was the same in both cities, but whereas Bahians could assert an 'African' ethnicity, the Paulistas viewed themselves as Brazilians who differed only in that they were 'black'. A cultural ethnicity prevailed in the former instance, and a racial ethnicity in the latter. The cultural ethnicity was made possible by a large and diverse black population, but tended to exclude Afro-Brazilians who chose not to adhere to African cultural traditions. In contrast, the racial ethnicity was all-inclusive, but only arose where the black population was small in number" (58).	5
Overall this book offers a clear comparative analysis of the post-abolition Afro-Brazilian community in two cities. Furthermore, among the book's many strengths is that it moves beyond a simple comparison of two populations. Butler successfully analyses her subjects within the much broader context of the African diaspora throughout the Americas. She effectively draws on Jamaican Myalism, Cuba's war of independence (1868–78), U.S. black civil war veterans, and various other movements and events from the Afro-Atlantic diaspora to support and contextualize her argument. The book offers rare insight into the struggle for self-determination among a population that has traditionally lacked a historic voice. It is a useful tool for the university classroom at both the undergraduate and graduate level and makes an important contribution to the literature on race in Latin America and the Atlantic World.	6
Zachary R. Morgan Brown University

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