The revolt of the saints: Popular memory, urban renewal and national heritage in the twilight of Brazilian racial democracy.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the production of histories and racial identities around the 1967--present making of a cultural heritage center in Salvador, Brazil's Pelourinho (Pillory) neighborhood. The Pelourinho---the former center of the Portuguese South Atlantic, a UNESCO heritage zone, an infamous red light zone until 1992, and one of Brazil's most resonant symbols of its African heritage---stands as a national historic place not because of its role in important events, but because of its salience in the stories of interracial desire at the heart of the Brazilian nation and a national people. At a moment of significant challenges to the narratives of sensuous miscegenation so constitutive of the Brazilian nation, the Pelourinho and its population have been transformed into a mnemonic device and a sacred ground for national origins. This alignment of unstable identities and the unruly inhabitants on whom they depend requires enormous effort that I chart through ethnographic and archival research with both residents and state institutions. Central to the definition of Brazilianness in the Pelourinho has been the collection of ethnographic data that allows disparate habits to be organized into recognizable national traits. Even as a majority of residents have been removed, the scientific study of this excised population has produced a state archive construed as representative of Afro-Brazilians' intimate habits and life stories. Such production of knowledge about a populace that serves as symbolic ancestors to the nation girds state attempts to chart its narratives of order and progress, to police the racialized and gendered boundaries of community belonging, and to demonstrate its purported responsiveness to Afro-Brazilian citizens. The concurrent monumentalization and pathologization produce a remarkable state of intimacy that inspires those residents able to remain in the neighborhood. Beatified as national possessions, these properly historical subjects participate actively in categorizations of people and the production of history in a nation where they come to exercise enormous influence and help reveal the limits of state power. Their aspirations, couched in the languages of Pentecostalism, community morality, social science, and folklore, promise to expand existing definitions of the moral, the historical, and the human.