Book Review: Deeply rooted in the present: Heritage,memory,and identity in Brazilian Quilombos

The discussion of the authenticity of “blackness” has long been the source of scholarly dispute within the study of African descendants in the Americas. Deeply Rooted in the Present: Heritage, Memory, and Identity in Brazilian Quilombos by Mary Lorena Kenny (2018), returns to this issue by analyzing the 21st-century Quilombola identification in Brazil with regard to the policies and processes for claiming Quilombo (self-liberated African descendant communities) entitlement to land. The study is an anthropological construction of the Quilombola identity as an ethnoracial and political category, as representative of the descendants of Africans who, in this case, escaped enslavement in Talhado, into the mountainous semiarid northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba. Through ethnographic methods, Kenny ponders the impact of historical contexts in making memory and constructing a legitimate Black identity by a population that was previously considered a mixed one.

The book, intended for a general audience, consists of an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. The book also includes a “Further Reading” section and a “Supplementary Exercises” section, which can guide the reader into further explorations of Afro-Brazilian identity, race relations, and culture. In the Introduction, Kenny (2018) offers an overview of her study and approaches, acknowledging herself as a White American anthropologist researching a poor, rural, Black and mixed community in Brazil. She associates with the kind of anthropology that understands culture as a set of things that become cultural and that are shaped by the particularity of historical circumstances (Kenny, 2018). Each chapter supports the argument that the Quilombolas (Maroons) of Talhado, or Talhados, can be seen as a case study and opportunity for alternatively examining claims to Quilombo heritage from the present, as opposed to the kind of anthropology that focused on tangible past records for corroborating identity.

In “Slavery, Quilombos, and Land,” Kenny (2018) explores the history of the Quilombo of Talhado and its association to enslavement and land entitlement in Brazil, the specific demographics of the sertão (desert) in Paraíba, as well as a general Maroon history of the region. In Chapter 2, the author oversees the legacy of enslavement in present day society and the current shaping of the Quilombola identity of Talhados, one that came to existence after efforts from local officials, scholars, and activists reconfigured this population as Black and of Quilombo heritage, as opposed to mixed or of Indigenous descendant heritage. Talhado people became Quilombolas after Talhado was officially recognized as a Quilombo descendant community in 2004. She presents this claim to identity as strategic, as a form of self-preservation, while others have called it opportunism.

The author emphasizes the significance of the construction of such multilayered identity as always being actively in the making in the third chapter, “Quilombola Identity.” This active-making of identity included the official and legal operationalization of a Quilombola; a long, complicated, and dialectical process between government officials, politicians, scholars, and activists. It also speaks to the lively and unique methodology of pottery making that resists mechanization, just as it was done 160 years ago: a living memory and reminder of the “struggle and fortitude” of Afro-Brazilian Quilombola lifestyle (Kenny, 2018, p. 89). As Kenny (2018) herself depicts it: “the fact that any traditions survived is evidence of strength in the face of overwhelming obstacles” (p. 91). Quilombola identification, as she concludes, is an opportunity from which to embrace new narratives of Quilombo heritage, while also exhibiting the existence of contemporary racial discrimination and violence.

Although she delineates the flawlessness of the dominant racial harmony rhetoric of Brazil, the unveiling of this discourse as unrealistic and pervasive is not unique. Studies of African descendant communities in Central and South America demanding land rights such as the Colombian Palanque and the Garifuna people in Honduras, assimilate this book’s approach. Yet, Kenny does not deeply articulate why this political shift of claiming blackness and denouncing racism and discrimination in Paraíba came about in the first place. A myopic sense of historicity—one that looks merely from the present—that has been applied in this study may underlie this lack of profundity.

Still, with the rise of Black cultural and political organizations, this case study could set an example for scrutinizing future developments of collective Black conscientization in countries where the racial mixture ideology is the norm and a shade that minimizes the reality of institutionalized racism. It also sets the question of identity as a choice influenced by present socioeconomic pressures. What are the factors at stake for consciously becoming Black? How will an increase in Black self-identification change mixed societies in the future? What is it that makes these Brazilians choose their Africanism or Blackness above an “Indigenous” or “mixed” identity? Social and economic benefits acquired after evincing Quilombola identity is what Kenny (2018) concludes. A decision that can change depending on the context that nourishes the making of such boundaries. What matters is not if one is “truly” Black or not, but the extent to which this identity is contextually reinforced as resourceful and desirable, while rejecting the negative perceptions this identity has traditionally been associated with in Western society.

Studying the reversal of the process of branqueamento (Whitening) that occurred in the Americas, as happens with Talhado, is of great significance to the field of Africology, cultural anthropology, history, sociology, and Latin American and Caribbean studies. This could be in-line with scholarship that focuses on the agency, as opposed to the victimization, of the African Diaspora. Likewise, the granting of communal land to maroon communities should be seen as just a start and means to liberation rather than an end in itself. A future examination of this topic across the Americas would be useful and very much needed.