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A Refuge in Thunder: Candomble and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (review)

2006; Indiana University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ral.2006.0023

1527-2044

Kim D. Butler,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

Reviewed by: A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness Kim D. Butler A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness By Rachel E. HardingBloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. Scholars of the African diaspora have long focused on religious ideology, institutions, and social manifestations as a particularly rich venue for analyzing the complexities of cultural interactions and reformulations that created New World societies. From the start, early scholarship by such writers as Manuel Querino, Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, and Roger Bastide helped establish Brazil as central to that analytical project. Despite the voluminous literature in the century since, Rachel Harding succeeds in bringing a fresh take on the Afro-Brazilian religion broadly known as candomblé in A Refuge in Thunder. In this work, Harding goes beyond merely tracing the processes by which neo-African cultures took shape in the diaspora. She takes it a step further by focusing on the social, cultural, and political mandates that guided those transformations and constitute defining characteristics of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. Harding writes as a social historian with the sensibilities of an anthropologist. This is particularly helpful for the book's central project of mining scant source material for sophisticated interpretations. One of the challenges of research on the African diaspora, particularly prior to the nineteenth century, is the lack of recovered literature by Africans and their descendants. Harding argues that if we imagine the sacred worlds created in the diaspora in both their psychic and material senses, those spaces can then be read as primary texts in the African diaspora voice. [End Page 160] In one of the most imaginative chapters of the book, Harding uses this approach to analyze the specific ways in which the Calundú and Bolsa de Mandinga traditions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries influenced the far more widely studied Candomblé from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Traditional historical approaches tend to preclude such an in-depth inquiry because of the paucity of sources historians like to use. Harding's inquiry privileges meaning over form, and draws from her deep understanding of twentieth century candomblé to re-read the existing documentation on these earlier eighteenth century cultural practices. Harding identifies certain paradigms that came to be widely shared throughout the Afro-Brazilian community. In this regard, her work reaffirms Monica Schuler's observation of the same phenomenon in Afro-Jamaican culture, and an argument advanced subsequently by Michael Gomez and others, that the process of pan-African cultural adaptations was a critical factor that redefined the contours of the black cultures of the Americas as the African-born population gave way to American-born creoles. Later, she examines how the history and, indeed, much of the physical experience of slave life, were inscribed into the routines of day-to-day life within the world of contemporary candomblé. In other words, there exist many historical texts beyond those captured on the printed page. The bulk of the text focuses on candomblé as it developed in the northeastern city of Salvador, Bahia. Harding's primary sources are drawn mostly from nineteenth-century police records, during a time when Bahia's elites were trying to purge Africa from Bahian culture. The documents could be read as a reflection of elite fears, agendas, and their view of African-based religious practice as subversive and criminal. Harding revisits the stories of the encounters between candomblé adherents and authorities recorded in those documents not only to glean information on the constitutive elements of what was becoming known as candomblé but, perhaps more germane to her central argument that it provided a true space of empowerment, she details the ways in which candomblé gave Afro-Brazilians actual power to be claimed in the larger society. Thus, when a candomblé ceremony is raided by Brazilian authorities on grounds that it was an offense against the national religion of Catholicism, its organizer claims his own role as an "authority" and a citizen. Such examples support Harding's argument that the power of the sacred physical, spiritual, and mental spaces claimed by Afro-Brazilians devolved upon the persons to whom the state denied power. In making her point, Harding's focus tends to blur some...