A revista Afro-Ásia é uma publicação semestral do Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais e da Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da Universidade Federal da Bahia, dedicada, sobretudo, a temas afro-brasileiros, africanos e asiáticos. Essa publicação dedica-se à divulgação de estudos relativos às populações africanas, asiáticas e seus descendentes no Brasil e alhures. A revista preenche destacado espaço na vida cultural brasileira, pois ainda é um dos poucos periódicos nacionais inteiramente dedicados a temas afro-brasileiros e africanos. Visa promover a reflexão e o debate acadêmico sobre temas relacionados com a história da escravidão, as relações raciais e os complexos processos de construção identitária. Assim como produzir referências significativas para uma ação sócio-política progressista, orientada para o combate às desigualdades étnico-raciais na sociedade.

News

The Globethics library contains articles of Afro-Ásia as of vol. 1(1965) to current.

Recent Submissions

  • Entre as Linhas 14 e 15: histórias, trajetórias e contextos de mestres alabês soteropolitanos

    Palmeira, Rafael Souza (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    This article presents and discusses stories, trajectories and dynamics of religious drum masters (Alabês) from Salvador, Bahia, their connections and contexts, announcing a socio-religious collectivity. Initially, data from interviews with three drum master are shared, emphasizing some approximations regarding their formative processes as candomblé musicians and sociocultural conditions. Bibliographic and ethnographic data are added to the informations provided from the interviews, thus providing an overview of this collective of Alabês masters and their surroundings. Finally, the scope of this religious collectivity is expanded from the presentation of transits and connections between religious temples to which the interviewees have ties, thus demonstrating how imbricated are the music of candomblé and its characters with the events and dynamics of religion in a general way. From the particular to the universal, the aims is to demonstrate how these layers overlap, being, at the same time, constituted and constituents of this universe.
  • Protecting the Rear Guard: Angolan Women in the Anti-Colonial Struggle

    Santos da Silva, Dayane Augusta (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    In Angola, in the narratives about the war of independence, there is a common recognition that ordinary women contributed to the anti-colonial struggle, highlighting the countless activities and tasks carried out by these women in the war of national liberation. In this sense, based on oral testimonies and military sources, this article highlights the role of women, based on the work carried out in the liberated zones, in their maintenance and sustainability, and outside these zones, in specific actions, in the different provinces of Angola. I argue that a group of anonymous women, many of them peasants, maintained an “anti-colonial economy”, seeking to maintain a certain autonomy for the struggle, independent of the Portuguese administration. In view of this, I believe that they should be considered “guerrillas” and not just “combatants”, in order to call into question the secondary position to which they were relegated by historiography and by subsequent narratives about the war of liberation.
  • "The Saints of a Devotion that Never Dies": Festivities for Saints Cosmas and Damian in Bahia, 1864-1955

    Iyanaga, Michael (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    This essay aims to analyze the development of the cult of the twin saints Cosmas and Damian in Bahia. By way of an examination of historical sources related to the cult – with a primary focus on newspapers and other popular media sources from the city of Salvador from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th – the author demonstrates that the cult of the twin saints in Salvador only begins to take off when it emerges in association with the world of Black cultural practices. By the turn of the 20th century, the cult becomes a widespread part of Salvador’s culture. The data suggest that much more than a type of “syncretism,” the devotion to Saints Cosmas and Damian is an innovation that despite being rooted in many European and African cosmologies, can never be reduced to any of them.
  • Images of African Eunuchs: Orientalism, Teratology, and tje Colonial Imagination

    de Souza Correa, Silvio Marcus (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    The European pictorial tradition’s ‘orientalism’ was one of the many sources of images of African eunuchs. An orientalist iconography of African eunuchs was present in the illustrated press and travel literature. Furthermore, medical teratology discussed eunuchs. As a visual record of human ‘types’, photography of African eunuchs was part of a teratologic inventory of a world about to disappear, according to the perspective of the colonial empires. Based on an iconographic corpus in diverse media support, this paper discusses the paradoxical ‘subalternity’ of African eunuchs and searches for the eunuchs’ inaudible voice in historiography. Finally, this paper maps the winding road from male genital mutilation to the symbolic emasculation of Africans in the colonial imaginary.
  • Witchcraft or Gentilism? African Religious Leaders in Colonial Brazil

    Soares, Mariza de Carvalho (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    Review of:RODRIGUES, Aldair; MAIA, Moacir (Eds.). Sacerdotisas voduns e rainhas do Rosário. Mulheres africanas e Inquisição em Minas Gerais (século XVIII). São Paulo: Chão, 2023. 192 p.
  • Bahia as Field Station

    Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio Alfredo (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    Review of:SANSONE, Livio. Estação etnográfica Bahia: a construção transnacional dos Estudos Afro-brasileiros (1935-1967). Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2022. 317 p.
  • Breaking with the World Gilberto Freyre Created: Convergences between the Black and Anti-colonial Movements in the Process of Emancipation and Critique of Cultural Hegemony.

    Oliveira, Vinicius Rosalvo de (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    As a theoretical premise, the article starts from a transnational perspective to observe two phenomena and their interrelationships. First, we are interested in understanding, according to the international context of the emergence of human rights, the role of Gilberto Freyre and his theses in the rapprochement between Brazil and Portugal in the 1950s. At this point, we propose to intertwine studies on racial democracy and Lusotropicalism in favor of an interconnected understanding of these concepts and their interrelationships in the discursive reconfiguration of these two states. In a second moment,  understanding the process of cultural emancipation as a foundational stage of political organization and therefore the fight against racism and colonialism, we direct our gaze to the reception and criticism of Freyrian theses by voices in the Brazilian black movement and leaders of the anti-colonial struggle in Portugal.
  • The Portuguese and the Caribbean: Sugarcane Brazil and the Great Caribbean during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

    Schwartz, Stuart B. (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    During the 16th and 17th centuries, the climate, agricultural potential, and history made Brazil a model, an alternative, and a competitor for some Caribbean societies. The relationship between Brazil and the Caribbean changed over time, but there were also continuities, circulation of information and interactions that linked their histories. In this essay, my I will focus on Brazil as an extension of the Greater Caribbean, on the role of the Portuguese in the Caribbean, and on their shared and interconnected history of sugar and slavery.
  • A Handbook on How to Do Sociology from the Asian continent

    Rocha, Marianne da Silva (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    Review of:ALATAS, Syed Farid; SINHA, Vineeta. Teoria sociológica além do cânone. São Paulo: Editora Funilaria, 2023. 336 p.
  • The Formation of the African Collection at the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaelogy and Anthropology, Late 19th Century

    Silva-Santos, Vanicleia (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    This essay deals with the first acquisitions of the African collection of the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania, a striking example of the formation of anthropology museums in the United States and their connections with European imperialism in Africa. The documentation consulted on the formation of the Penn Museum’s collection is in the Penn Museum Archives. I critically examine the archives, vocabulary, and organization of the foundational narrative to denaturalize colonial categories of knowledge produced in the past that remain as choices of the present. The imperial criteria involved in collecting and analyzing African material culture consolidated a distorted narrative about symbols of power, transformed into museum objects. Consequently, museums miseducated generations about the objects’ artistic production and social context. So, I offer an analysis of the creative output of an ivory bracelet from the ancient Kingdom of Benin that belongs to the Penn Museum African Collection.
  • The 13th of May Celebrations in Post-Abolition Rio de Janeiro

    Costa, Mariana Barbosa Carvalho da (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    Review of:MORAES, Renata Figueiredo. As festas da abolição no Rio de Janeiro (1888-1908). Rio de Janeiro: FGV Editora, 2023. 311 p.
  • Cutouts and Borders

    Cunha, Olívia Maria Gomes da (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    Review of:PRICE, Richard. Inside/Outside: Adventures in Caribbean History and Anthropology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022.
  • Ivory: Uses and Meanings in Atlantic History

    Almeida, Marcos Leitão de (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    Review of:SANTOS, Vanicléia Silva (Ed.). Marfins africanos como insígnias de poder: contextos de produção e usos dentro e fora da África. São Paulo: Fino Traço, 2023. 364 p.
  • Credits

    Afro-Ásia, Editores (UFBA, 2024-01-20)
    Afro-Ásia, No. 68 (2023)
  • Searching for “a Slave Named Laudelino”: Posssibilites for Doing Historical Research Using Oral Traditions, Written Sources and Ethnography

    Pazos Pereira, Carolina (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    This article deals with the research techniques and methods utilized in a study of a rural black community called Barra II, in the municipality of Morro do Chapéu, Bahia, Brazil; specifically, the attempt to trace an enslaved person named Laudelino. Using oral history, ethnography and archival research, it was possible to reconstruct the trajectory of Laudelino and other captives who joined free black people, forming extended families in the backlands of Bahia. The process of cross-referencing historical sources, driven by memories of slavery, reveals the particularities of slavery in this region, also showing black farmers forms of sociability and territorial occupation. New approaches on slavery and post-abolition in northeastern Brazil increasingly need to dialogue with black communities self-identified as quilombos, actively listening to them and valuing memory as a privileged source for historical reconstruction.
  • The Família de Santo in the Candomblé of Recife: Blood and Spiritual Kinship

    Pinto Filho, Olavo de Souza (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    This article’s central concern is the família de santo (spiritual kinship system) in the Candomblé of Recife, Pernambuco. Spiritual kinship is configured as an extensive network of houses, individuals, deities, and ancestors linked through two recognized types of relationships: one of blood, the other spiritual. The distinction (and not opposition) between these two forms reveals the fundamental aspect of the relationship between these two terms, creating a disposition that is replicated at different levels and in which blood and spiritual kinship are conceived as coextensive.
  • Between Slaves and Comrades, a Master: Social Relations and Strategies of Resistance in the Rural Frontier of Corumbá (1878-1886)

    Araújo, Sabrina; Marin, Jérri Roberto (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    The objective of this text is to analyze a criminal process in the region of Santa Cruz de Corumbá, in the province of Mato Grosso do Sul, which was processed between the years 1878 and 1886. The document handles the murders of the proprietary of the lands, Firmiano Firmino Ferreria Candido and his foreman, João Pedro, conduced by his slaves and comrades, due to the excessive corporal punishments and delayed payments. After that, there was an attempt to escape to Bolivia, but the murderers were arrested and judged.with the exception of the comrade João Ignácio, that managed to scape. From that episode, we intend to approach the motivations behind the crimes and contribute to the understanding of the complex relationships of the work between social categories, as well as to discuss the characteristics of the settlement and occupation of this rural and border region.
  • A Good and Old Subject for a New Book

    Santos, Igor Gomes (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    Review of:BEZERRA, José Maia Neto. Fugindo, sempre fugindo. Escravidão, fugas escravas na Amazônia Brasileira (1840-1888). Teresina: Cancioneiro, 2023. 364 p.
  • “Black Flowers”, Voices for Freedom

    Paixão, Marcelo (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    Review of:Raussert, Wilfried; e Steinitz, Matti (Orgs.). Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective: Movements and Cultures of Resistance in the Black Americas. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier; Nova Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2022. 280 p.
  • The Passage from Two to Three: Dialectical Pairs in Itamar Vieira Junior's "Torto Arado"

    Nascimento, Ana Paula Gomes do (UFBA, 2023-12-31)
    This article analyzes 5 aspects of the novel Torto arado: the narrative space-time; the dialectical pairs involved; the strategy of establishing narrative instances; the symbolism of three objects over the course of the story; and, finally, some of the names attributed to the characters. We aim to show that land is a central category for analyzing the novel and to demonstrate how a dialectical method of interpretation is one of the most productive possibilities for deciphering it. Different social relations in a single geographical space are evidenced by memory, African ancestry and the Jarê religion, as well as by a logic of common land use in contrast to the capitalist private ownership of it. As such, the conflicts surrounding rights to housing, work and land are fundamental pillars of the narrative, from which the consciousness of the characters emerges, as well as their struggles.

View more