Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The dancing spirits of world capitalism: Globalisation, popular culture and citizenship in Salvador, Bahia

2000; Routledge; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13260219.2000.10429596

2151-9668

Rowan Ireland,

Race, Identity, and Education in Brazil

Abstract This article examines claims about the development of a black civil rights movement in a context of cultural and economic globalisation in the city of Salvador, the capital of the large Northeastern state of Bahia, Brazil. The precise issues taken up and the research design have been shaped by the aims and vicissitudes of the wider study of which it is a part—an investigation of the so-called popular movements and citizenship in three Brazilian cities—São Paulo, Recife and Salvador. In 1988 a first round of fieldwork was completed in the first two cities. This was designed to trace how the movements actually worked in particular bairros populares, or lower class residential areas. A major aim of the research was to discover whether the movements, which ought to be observable in local associations and organisations, were all they were represented to be. A couple of years earlier, when the study was being planned, academic excitement in the movement ran very high indeed: out of a range of popular movements (a grassroots health movement, shanty-town community movements, urban land-rights movements, a new union movement, a black civil rights movement) a new Brazilian citizen was seen to be demanding, and further, constructing a new, more equitable and participatory Brazilian democracy.1 In these movements, the ‘popular classes’—formerly dependent clients of the elites who made Brazilian history, mere survivors in a political economy they could not shape—were thought to be acquiring and exercising citizenship. They were, in the movements, as well as in their new civic communities and associations, beginning to display the capacities and dispositions to do what citizens do: to criticise, devise and enact projects for the city, and beyond for the republic. Brazil's new citizens were thought, or were hoped to be, engaged in a prolonged moment of what Roberto Mangabeira Unger called ‘exemplary instability’.2