Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores visual portrayals of blackness in Brazil to reveal the integral role of visual culture in crafting race and nation across Latin America.
Trade Review[
Selling Black Brazil] is a fundamental critique of the utilization of Blackness in Bahia...The book exposes how tourism, the arts, and elite politicians think about Blackness, and by extension how limited this mode of thinking is. Romo shows how elites can move to capture cultural policies and instrumentalize them according to their interests. * NACLA *
Elegantly written, lavishly illustrated, and cogently argued...
Selling Black Brazil challenges historians of twentieth-century Salvador, Brazil’s 'Black Rome,' to think more carefully about how that construction of the city came into being in the 1940s and 1950s and about the limits and exclusions deeply embedded in this portrayal of Blackness as central to Salvador’s culture. * H-LatAm *
With a compelling and clear prose, Romo’s study is a welcome addition to the literature about Afro-Brazilian art...Reevaluating the relationship of Black identity and Brazilian modernism, [
Selling Black Brazil pushes] us to rethink how we teach and study nationalism, race, and art in Brazil. * Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture *
[Romo] calls attention to the extent to which the story of tourism's visual culture is not only a Brazilian story but an American one, and she makes occasional and evocative references to similar stories elsewhere, such as Peru and Mexico, where tourism imagery helped conflate each nation with its 'native' elements. In
Selling Black Brazil, Romo has provided important touchstones for such comparative work. More important, she has deepened our knowledge of both the emergence of Brazilian tourism, which is still, surprisingly, very little studied, and the process of invention that transformed Salvador into Black Rome. * Hispanic American Historical Review *
Table of ContentsPreface
Glossary
Introduction: Race, Identity, and Visual Culture in the Americas
Chapter 1. Precedents and Backdrops: Racial Types and Modern Ports
Chapter 2. Colonial Churches and the Rise of the Quintessential Black City: Modernism, Travel, and the Pathbreaking Guide of Jorge Amado
Chapter 3. Pierre Verger and the Construction of a Black Folk, 1946–1951
Chapter 4. Festive Streets: Carybé and Bahian Modernism
Chapter 5. “Human and Picturesque”: Consolidation in the Bahian Tourist Guides of the 1950s
Chapter 6. All Roads Lead to Black Rome: How the Religion of “Secrets” Became a Tourist Attraction
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
