Race and the Art of Tourist Promotion in Bahia, Brazil: Crafting an Urban Landscape, 1900-1964

FAIN: HB-251153-17

Anadelia A. Romo
Texas State University - San Marcos (San Marcos, TX 78666-4684)

Completion of a book-length study of how promotion of tourism forged and reinforced racial stereotypes in Bahia, Brazil, from the abolition of slavery in 1888 through the 1950s.

My project examines the reinvention of a former sugar zone in Brazil’s Northeast and probes how the promotion of tourism forged and reinforced racial stereotypes in the aftermath of abolition. To do this I turn to sources neglected by historians: illustrated tourist guides for Brazil’s colonial capital of Salvador, Bahia, written from the 1920s through the 1950s. I show how the budding tourism industry of this era developed a distinctive iconography that placed Afro-Bahians as central to the city’s landscape, an apparently inclusive visual culture that worked well with Brazil’s promotion of itself as a racial democracy. Yet I argue that the intersection of tourism and a new visual landscape of the city shaped and consolidated pernicious stereotypes of blackness and exoticized visions of African culture that continue to dominate the visual culture of the city today. I am seeking an NEH grant for a year of full-time work to be able to write three central chapters of my book manuscript.

Associated Products

Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia (Book)
Title: Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia
Author: Anadelia Romo
Abstract: In the early twentieth century, Brazil shifted from a nation intent on whitening its population to one billing itself as a racial democracy. Anadelia Romo shows that this shift centered in Salvador, Bahia, where throughout the 1950s, modernist artists and intellectuals forged critical alliances with Afro-Brazilian religious communities of Candomblé to promote their culture and their city. These efforts combined with a growing promotion of tourism to transform what had been one of the busiest slaving depots in the Americas into a popular tourist enclave celebrated for its rich Afro-Brazilian culture. Vibrant illustrations and texts by the likes of Jorge Amado, Pierre Verger, and others contributed to a distinctive iconography of the city, with Afro-Bahians at its center. But these optimistic visions of inclusion, Romo reveals, concealed deep racial inequalities. Illustrating how these visual archetypes laid the foundation for Salvador’s modern racial landscape, this book unveils the ways ethnic and racial populations have been both included and excluded not only in Brazil but in Latin America as a whole.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/romo-selling-black-brazil
Primary URL Description: UT Press Catalog
Access Model: purchase
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4773-241
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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