Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Palm Oil Diasporas and the Development of Baianidade

2023; University of Texas Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lag.2023.a915676

1548-5811

Vanessa Castañeda,

Rural Development and Agriculture

Palm Oil Diasporas and the Development of Baianidade Vanessa Castañeda "Eu tenho dendê nas veias" (I have palm oil in my veins). I've heard this statement, or some form of it, from various people born and raised in or right outside of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. By claiming to have dendê (which is native to continental Africa) running through one's veins, it is as if palm oil is as life-giving as the blood that keeps one's organs, body, and brain alive and functioning. This strong symbolic association is, in part, due to palm oil's ubiquity and frequent consumption within the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia and the city of Salvador (often simply referred to as Bahia). Within the cosmology of the Afro-diasporic religion Candomblé, palm oil is fundamental for nourishing and making sacred offerings to the orixás, or deities. Outside of this spiritual context, palm oil sustains typical Bahian cuisine, and its smell permeates the streets and beaches of Salvador in foods such as the beloved fried black-eyed pea cake acarajé and the coconut milk–based seafood stew moqueca, among others. As Case Watkins notes, "[T]o say something is 'de dendê' (of palm oil) is to qualify it as absolutely Bahian and with fundamental connections [End Page 184] to Africa and its diaspora" (p. 7). How, though, did this symbolic association come to be? That is one of the central questions of Watkins's transtemporal and interdisciplinary book, Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia's Dendê Coast. Palm Oil Diaspora is making an impact across fields and interdisciplinary boundaries. Of particular significance is its contribution of a much-needed perspective to the rich scholarship on Bahia and baianidade. Baianidade or Bahianness, is a local identity discourse rooted in African essence, joy, cordiality, racial harmony, and a celebratory culture of street festivals and Afro-cultural expressions (Castañeda, 2021). A wealth of multidisciplinary literature has underscored how baianidade is arguably the strongest regional identity discourse in Brazil, with scholarly attention given to African and Afro-Bahian public street festivals (Ickes, 2013), Afro-diasporic religious practices (Afolabi, 2022; Matory, 2005), the expansive influence of Bahian music (Dunn, 2001), the far-reaching power of Carnaval blocos (Afolabi, 2016; Butler, 1998; Pinho, 2010), the development of official state narratives (Romo, 2010; Teles, 2005), as well as the anti-Black violence that sustains them (Smith, 2016). However, little attention has been given to the essential role of palm oil in defining baianidade, which permeates religious, gastronomic, agricultural, and economic spheres. By tracking and contextualizing this vital and ubiquitous component of Bahia's cultural heritage, Palm Oil Diaspora deepens our understanding of baianidade and of the Black Atlantic. Similar to Matory's (2005) conceptual offering of the development of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé as an ongoing, radically transnational dialogue, Watkins similarly tracks the material and abstract exchanges of actors from all sides of the ocean along the course of centuries. Instead of seeing the arrival and flourishing of palm oil within the Brazilian ecological and cultural landscapes as a unidirectional voyage, Watkins demonstrates that subjects of the African diaspora have been agents of multidirectional physical and intellectual movement within Bahia and across the Atlantic. Thus, the dynamic and polysemic meanings imbued in palm oil today reflect its dynamic history and multitudinous journey. In other words, Palm Oil Diaspora exposes readers to a transnational trajectory of palm oil that simultaneously allows for cultivating a deeply rooted sense of place and identity in Bahia, while also marking and dialoguing with other sites in the Atlantic World. Watkins goes beyond the siloed categories that reduce cultural formations to "African survivals" or independent "Creole" innovations. Instead, he argues that African peoples creatively adapted to their New World environments by using their depth of knowledge to cultivate palm oil in ways that met their culinary, domestic, and spiritual needs. Meanwhile, the ongoing transoceanic dialogue of exchanges facilitated the continued cultivation of palm oil as part of the growing baianidade regional identity. An important point to underscore is that within this transoceanic dialogue, palm oil sometimes served a contradictory position in which, on the one hand, it facilitated the...