the sorcery of color - review

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146 | Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 83, octubre de 2007

– The Sorcery of Color, Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil , by Elisa Larkin Nas-

cimento. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006.

Written firstly as a doctoral thesis in Portuguese (O Sortilégio da Cor, 2002), The

Sorcery of Color has been made available to a broader public with its publication

in English. This has come at a critical moment marked by increasing polarization

around affirmative action policies in the long-term fight for racial justice in Brazil.

This process is occurring in a country where, throughout the entire twentieth cen-

tury, the white elites – who are responsible for forging the Brazilian nation as a

symbolic community of interests – have in every way denied the possibility of con-

sidering those racial distinctions which are overtly visible in the country’s socio-

economic structures as a ground for political action or even as a source of personal

identity for concrete social subjects. The disclosure of the social construction of

‘race’, personally experienced by social agents, with its practical outcomes in the

reproduction of a nationwide pattern of racial exclusion and violence (for example,as pointed out by Telles, 2004) has become the main national taboo. The mere

mention of the words ‘race’ or – even worse – ‘racism’ is strongly disapproved of

by Brazilian moral entrepreneurs, which include journalists, social scientists and

artists. Thus, subjugated by the powers of persistent racial inequality and injustice,

black subjects are not even allowed to think of themselves, or of Brazilian social

structures, from a politically racialized perspective. A dense and virtually impene-

trable wall of silence and misrecognition has been imposed upon black social actors.

Black political organization as described in Nascimento’s book has been con-

sidered a sign of anti-national feelings, of imported foreign (namely North Ameri-

can) issues and, at the very least, as something blatantly dangerous. The theme of

‘danger’, has been repeated by those moral entrepreneurs almost as a curse, and

has followed every single black political manifestation throughout the last century.

The assembly and mobilization of black people has been obstructed by every

means. That is why it seems to be dangerous for national unity and risky for the

black population itself to denounce the racial iniquities that have made Brazil what

it is today. It is exactly by means of what Nascimento calls ‘the sorcery of color’

that this achievement, the denial and criminalization of black mobilization, has

been fulfilled.

We may summarize the main arguments of the book in three axes: firstly, thehistorical construction of the ideological device of the ‘sorcery of color’ or ‘virtual

whiteness’ (in doing so, the author follows the path opened by Brazilian black in-

tellectuals such as Abdias do Nascimento and Alberto Guerreiro Ramos); secondly,

the consideration of the role played by gender in these historical hierarchies, as

well as in the core of black mobilization; and finally, the priority awarded to edu-

cation in the black political agenda for Brazil. These axes interconnect with a vig-

orous criticism of leftist approaches to racial matters in Brazil, a topic of the great-

est relevance to black politics all over the modern African diaspora (Robinson,

2000).

The miscegenation ideology, found not only in Brazil, but in many other Latin

American multi-racial countries such as Colombia and Venezuela (Wade 1996,

Right 1993) has been scrutinized by the author in order to demonstrate how, in

fact, this ideology takes for granted – and actually endorses – the hegemonic orien-



European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 83, October 2007 | 147

tation of nation-building towards the progressive whitening of society. It implies

the vigorous suppression of black or African cultural practices in Brazil. On the

other hand, this whitening presupposes the physical disappearance of the black

population. This idea implies the progressive extinction of the African ‘stain’ –

after 350 years of extensive use of a slave workforce. And the white elites have

taken concrete measures in this sense. One of the most remarkable was the promo-

tion of massive European migration just after the abolition of slavery, since from

this racialist perspective the black masses could not be accepted as a workforce

capable of participating in the rising Brazilian industrialization. And the fundamen-

tal feature of it is that it was all carried out as state policy. For no modern country,

from that perspective, could have been built with such a black and mixed-blood

population.

The reflection of these policies on Brazilian cultural and political life is obvi-

ous: great value is given to everything white, while everything associated with

blacks, blackness or African traditions is either denied or folklorized. The concreteresult of these processes was also the reproduction of a pattern of racial inequality

throughout the twentieth century and the suppression of any possibility of visualiz-

ing or even ‘representing’ race as something useful in understanding and fighting

social injustice. A law of silence has been applied to racial relations in Brazil in

such a way that merely to mention the word ‘race’ was, and still is, a reason for

accusing black activists and intellectuals of racism. This ‘magical’ and paradoxical

configuration is what Nascimento calls the ‘sorcery of color’.

The author accurately points out the impressive role of gender relations in the

reproduction of white supremacy in Brazil. To begin with, she shows how black

women make up the most impoverished social sector in Brazil, earning average

wages corresponding to about a quarter of those of white men. They are also un-

derprivileged by the intersectionality of gender and race structures of discrimina-

tion and violence. Moreover, the burden of decades of racist and sexist representa-

tions is borne by black women. Black women today are still regarded as falling

under basically two stereotypes according to the hegemonic point of view: that of

the maid – faithful and submissive, ‘almost’ belonging to the family in a kind of

intimate and sensual supremacy; and that of the sexual hyper-investment, in which

they are seen as more accessible, having non-restricted bodies, and being open to

sexual exploitation and violence.The book is explicitly devoted to making a huge theoretical and historical re-

view of the position of black people in Brazil, as well as of their fights for justice

and recognition, and in this it has been particularly successful. Placing herself on

these crossroads, blessed by Esu, the author produces an intellectual position com-

plimented by her political engagement, and makes a political statement by means

of her intellectual criticism. This intellectual enterprise is of great importance at

this moment when Brazil is undergoing unprecedented progressive polarization

regarding the implementation of affirmative action policies. Some observers seem

to picture this contention as a battle over the making of a strong, massive, and op-

positional black identity in Brazil, which is encouraging real moral panic, right

before our eyes.

Osmundo Pinho

Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), São Paulo



148 | Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 83, octubre de 2007

References

Robinson, Cedric (2000) Black Marxism – The Making of Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill and

London: The University of North Carolina Press.

Telles, Edward (2004) Race in Another America: the Significance of Race in Brazil . Princeton: Prince-

ton University Press.

Wade, Peter (1993) Blackness and Race Mixture: the Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia. Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Wright, Winthrop R. (1996) Café con Leche. Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela. Austin:

University of Texas Press.

– From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of

the World Economy, 1500-2000, edited by Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and

Zephyr Frank. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.

This is a well-done, very appealing, and highly recommendable book for scholars

interested in the economic history of Latin America or in global commodity chains.

The book is composed of chapters written by different authors. All of them adopt a

historical perspective, and analyse the emergence, prosperity and decadence of a

variety of commodity chains that were the major drivers of the economic integra-

tion of Latin American countries into the world economy across different time pe-

riods (from silver coins in the sixteenth century to cocaine in the twentieth cen-

tury). A number of insights may be drawn from the case studies under analysis.

First of all, almost all the authors stress the role of political decisions in shaping the

performance of commodity chains and the distribution of value between different

agents. The attention devoted to historical and governance aspects is shared withthe current ‘global value chain approach’, which basically analyses commodity

chains from a political economy perspective. Some chapters also take insights from

institutional economics by stressing the role of information flows between agents,

access to business networks and to financial markets in control of the chain.

The cases reveal a large diversity with regards to the governance structures and

the relationship between agents in exporting and importing regions, and how this

relationship has been shaped across time. For example, while the banana chain in

Central America was largely dominated by a single North American company dur-

ing many decades before the World War II, the Peruvian and Chilean states, aswell as national capitalists, were indeed able to reap a considerable part of the in-

terest generated in the nitrate and guano chains during the first decades of the

twentieth century. Despite this diversity, a quite remarkable feature shared by all

these chains – with significant development implications – is the extent to which

benefits have been concentrated in a few economic agents, either national or for-

eign capitalists or (less often) the state. This has been concomitant with hard work-

ing conditions and in most cases with semi-exploitative working relations. It is

therefore not surprising that many of these chains have been associated with social

uprising (often accompanied by harsh repression). This includes, for example,

tough conflicts in the Central American banana sector (linked to guerrilla move-ments and even coup d’états) and the origins of the Chilean labour movement in

the nitrate provinces. Such combination of conditions is undoubtedly at the root of

the fact that Latin America is the most unequal region in the world.

the sorcery of color - review

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