The aesthetic escape hatch: carnaval, blocos afro and the mutations of baianidade under the signs of globalisation and re-Africanisation

Abstract

Introduction: Bahian carnaval

The carnaval of Salvador, capital of Bahia State in Brazil, has grown immensely in popularity in recent years, so that it now rivals the more famous Rio carnaval in terms of numbers of visitors. Carnaval culture—music, dance, consumption and consequent entrepreneurial opportunities—has spread to the whole calendar of annual and weekly festivities, religious and secular, and has transformed Bahian society both in terms of its internal recreation patterns and in terms of its relations with external society. While the prominent traditional agricultural industries (cocoa, cattle, and vegetables) have encountered difficulties and contracted, tourism, largely based around carnaval or carnavalesque attractions, has increased spectacularly and become the centre of growth strategies. The old centre of Salvador has been transformed from extreme poverty and physical decay into the central tourist destination. Bahian pop music has penetrated the national and international markets. Bahian practices such as capoeira (martial arts dance) have spread around the world. An ever-growing number of international visitors (about 400,000 a year in a city of 2.5 million) arrive by plane, in search of cultural vitality and authenticity. The sheer volume of international visitors and the prominence of tourism as a source of new employment has also transformed local experience through personal exposure to foreigners with different ideas. A significant number of persons from previously completely marginalised classes have visited or lived in Western European countries as a result of this contact. While world globalisation (access and interaction between different locations) has been the pre-condition of the cultural marketing of Salvador to the world, the city itself has undergone globalisation in terms of qualitative culture as well as economic modernisation.1

For quantitative data on tourism, see the items listed under BAHIATURSA (the Bahian Government tourism organ). For an official account of cultural tourism strategies as pertaining to negritude, see J. A. Santos Silva, ‘O negro, etnia e cultura no turismo em Salvador da Bahia’, Unpublished manuscript, 1995. For an interpretive study of European cultural tourism and its impact on local race relations, see Armstrong, ‘The Cultural Economy of the Bahian Carnaval’, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 18, 1999, pp. 139–58.

For quantitative data on tourism, see the items listed under BAHIATURSA (the Bahian Government tourism organ). For an official account of cultural tourism strategies as pertaining to negritude, see J. A. Santos Silva, ‘O negro, etnia e cultura no turismo em Salvador da Bahia’, Unpublished manuscript, 1995. For an interpretive study of European cultural tourism and its impact on local race relations, see Armstrong, ‘The Cultural Economy of the Bahian Carnaval’, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 18, 1999, pp. 139–58.

Notes

For quantitative data on tourism, see the items listed under BAHIATURSA (the Bahian Government tourism organ). For an official account of cultural tourism strategies as pertaining to negritude, see J. A. Santos Silva, ‘O negro, etnia e cultura no turismo em Salvador da Bahia’, Unpublished manuscript, 1995. For an interpretive study of European cultural tourism and its impact on local race relations, see Armstrong, ‘The Cultural Economy of the Bahian Carnaval’, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 18, 1999, pp. 139–58.