Book Review: Black Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil

Abstract

Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil. 2013. KeishaKhan Y. Perry. Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-8324-6 The book examines the need for international solidarity with grassroots movements in Brazil and throughout the African diaspora. The author, Keisha-Kkan Y. Perry, presents an anthropological journey, which is intertwined with the everyday happenings of a social movement currently underway in Brazil. She conveys an in-depth sense of the women who drive the community movement in the neighbourhood of Gamboa de Baixo in Salvador (Brazil), from the perspective of someone who knew them and shared their friendship and their ideals. Through the narratives of these women, Perry highlights how land evictions and displacement work in the racist, sexist, and classist urban contexts of Brazil and how the complex process of galvanizing resistance against land expulsion operates. In chapter one, Perry describes the neighbourhood of Gamboa de Baixo in Salvador's city centre. Gamboa de Baixo is located underneath Contorno Avenue, along the bay, and is popularly described as situated below the asphalt street; thereby conveying the neighbourhood as a separate urban world, marked by immoral illegal activities of black men and women that are obscured from public view by busy Contorno Avenue. According to the author, the majority of black women in Gamboa de Baixo work as domestic servants for middle-and upper-class white families in the city of Salvador. These women are also key leaders who fight for land rights for poor blacks. The gendered racial and class hierarchies created by the spatial demarcations of the city streets, therefore resulted in the creation of a black female-led social movement to combat inequalities in the Chapter two illustrates how a technical aesthetical improvement to the city of Salvador, through the construction of Contorno Avenue, resulted in the invisibility of Gamboa de Baixo and its residents, both spatially and socially. According to one elderly woman in Gamboa de Baixo, the neighbourhood marginalized by the passage of Contorno Avenue, bringing to the residents oblivion and even discrimination in relationship to the rest of the city. In addition, the construction of the avenue led to the division of Gamboa de Baixo into two sectors-lower and upper; thereby serving to uphold hierarchies of racial, social and economic differences in the city of Salvador. The invisibility of Gamboa de Baixo also made the neighbourhood vulnerable to displacement in the decades that followed. Perry demonstrates, in chapter two, how history has become a commodity for public consumption and tourism in Salvador, as urban renewal focused on preserving physical and cultural aspects of Brazil, including present-day spatial memories of colonialism and slavery, such as Sao Paulo Fort in Gamboa de Baixo. Places where black people once lived have, therefore, become commercial sites for the consumption of black experiences and cultures without the people who produced that culture. The restoration of the urban centre, Pelourinho, in Salvador was also only driven by the symbolic valorisation and preservation of the historical product, distant from present-day reality, which erased the memory of slavery and racial and gender violence. Urban renewal, in Salvador, involved social abandonment by the city government and the subsequent deterioration of historic buildings, followed by the forced displacement of local residents during and after renovations. Spatialised-racial restructuring within the city of Salvador, hence, fuelled the political process of fighting for permanent residency and land rights in Gamboa de Baixo. In chapter three, the author gives an account of the history of the Gamboa de Baixo community movement against urban renewal programmes and for access to material resources, such as urban land and housing. …