200 ❙ Book Reviews

though traditional notions of gender made women’s political activism less

visible, “black women’s politics maintained a special vision of a racially
equal society” and “black women’s politics informed the debate on au-
thentic blackness and the future of the race” (135). It would take the
passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, a worldwide depression, and the
New Deal to once again make black women’s political activism a visible
and viable force in the fight for racial equality.
Both All Bound Up Together and Private Politics and Public Voices are
compelling accounts of black women’s activism during critical periods in
American history. Both studies successfully delineate the large-scale efforts
of black women’s grassroots organizing and offer important conclusions
about African American women’s political activism. ❙

Negras in Brazil: Re-envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics

of Identity. By Kia Lilly Caldwell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2007.

Violence in the City of Women: Police and Batterers in Bahia, Brazil. By

Sarah J. Hautzinger. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Mariza Corrêa, Unicamp, Brazil

G ender and race seem to form an inescapable mixture when one writes
about Brazil. These two books look at them in quite distinct ways,
however. One seems to search for a lost identity, the other for a new
one. Both look at women, mostly black, and both discuss ideological or
physical violence against them. But while the first seeks to understand
violence committed by a white elite against black people, the second seeks
to understand domestic violence, violence committed by those who are
part of the same community—sometimes pitting black men against black
women.
Kia Lilly Caldwell tries to show that the “use of essentialist discourses
and practices offers a means of challenging hegemonic nationalist dis-
courses which are premised on racial anti-essentialism” (179). The move
seems complicated, but it is also part of a cultural war going on, and not
just in Brazil. In order to dispense with the traditionally evoked Brazilian
notion of “an ostensibly fluid and nonpolar color continuum” (36) as a

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 S I G N S Autumn 2008 ❙ 201

form of “mestiço essentialism” (28), her book is looking for race in a

place where it seems that race has dissolved into the air—or rather into
flesh of all colors. As she insists on the “reality of race” (10), Caldwell
runs counter not only to today’s scientific reasoning and to historical
accounts of a very hybrid Brazilian society (including its elite) but also to
the beliefs of the women she interviewed. She admits that she had difficulty
“locating self-identified mulheres negras [black women]” (15), or Afro-
Brazilian ones, a notion that has never quite gained currency in Brazilian
politics. So, she turned to women of the Brazilian black movement, some
of whom adopted a black identity (essentialism) “to escape the ‘alienating
symbolic reality’ offered by Brazilian color categories” (115). She defines
this strategy as “racial anti-essentialism” (179). Faced with racism as a
political phenomenon, Caldwell never deals with it as such but instead
tries to anchor it in racial differences. In so doing she fails to pursue the
more promising lines offered by some of the women she talked with, who
pointed to the political nature of the discussion of “race” as a changeable
phenomenon, so much so that it has even affected black hairstyles over
the last twenty years. This means that race may be used as a political
identity tag—as many other identities were—for many purposes, even to
promote access to equal rights, as was the case with the black movement,
or the black women’s movement, in Brazil. This political use of identity
tags was also adopted by gay, female, and indigenous activists. So, when
a student of any color shade uses the quota system to gain inclusion in a
certain institution, he may be making use of a political tool for self-
promotion rather than a manifesto for the African diaspora.
It is true—meaning, historically documented—that Brazil had, and has,
an elite that identifies itself with white Europeans; that some members of
this elite in the nineteenth century supported the value of “whitening”
in order to foresee a “better future” for the country; and that “racial
hybridity” and “racial democracy” are not necessary synonyms—as it is
true also that racism, not race, is everywhere present in Brazil. But Bra-
zilian history—and, by the way, its musical history—is much richer and
more textured than shown here, and contests over identities are a good
part of it. Caldwell oversimplifies the dynamics of race in Brazil, not
recognizing the complexity of the language in songs. For example, she
writes, without blinking, that “markers of blackness . . . are largely
denigrated ” (39; emphasis added), finds “benign” overtly racist songs
(105), as well as misunderstanding the meanings of many other songs or
words (nêga, a shorter term for negra, used as an amorous locution, is a
case in point). As the expression she chooses to translate from a popular

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202 ❙ Book Reviews

carnival song, “Your hair gives you away” (O teu cabelo não nega), her
treatment of the Portuguese language and Brazilian people give her away
as a very interested party in the cultural wars on race.
Even though she experienced at least two situations in Brazil like the
ones suffered by Ruth Landes more than fifty years before—being treated
as a prostitute and called Americana (American)—Caldwell does not
evoke the name of Landes, one of the best-known students of Brazilian
black women. Sarah Hautzinger evokes Landes from the beginning—
using the title of her book (City of Women) as a part of the title of her
own.1 But Hautzinger uses it tongue in cheek, as it were, since she wants
to understand how such brave women, as depicted by Landes, can be
victims of aggression in their own city: “How does one resolve the seem-
ingly contradictory trends of resistant, indomitable women on one hand,
and domineering, bullying men on the other?” (22). What follows is a
fascinating ethnography done in Bahia in order to try to answer this
question but, first of all, to try to better formulate others, such as “Would
violence be necessary if men seeking to dominate women were not faced
with women’s noncompliance?” (174). Acknowledging the difficulty of
understanding the “complex, shifting, and context-sensitive terminologies
for color and features that Brazilians employ” (25), Hautzinger observes
that “‘blackness,’ of course, has no fixed, transnational meaning” (26).
But the principal aim of her work—which was carried out in the favelas
(slums) and in the delegacias das mulheres (women’s police stations), first
created in 1985—is to follow in the steps of the original argument made
by Maria Filomena Gregori in her book Cenas e queixas, best summarized
in Jean-Paul Sartre’s boutade (witticism) about women: “half victims, half
accomplices, as everybody else.”2 At the time (1992), Gregori’s book had
a pretty harsh reception from some more traditional feminists, who, like
Caldwell, favored the victimization perspective when dealing with the
question of battered (or black) women. “Mutual violence,” writes Haut-
zinger, “where women may themselves use violence as a way of asserting
themselves or refusing dominance, as well as men’s compensatory violence,
where violence is used more as damage control than to secure dominance,
also requires attention” (31).
Hautzinger’s creative use of the influence of African heritage in the
interpretation of conflicts—inspired by the work of J. Lorand Matory—

1
Ruth Landes, The City of Women (New York: Macmillan, 1947).
2
Maria Filomena Gregori, Cenas e queixas: Um estudo sobre mulheres, relações violentas
e a prática feminista [Scenes and complaints: A study of women, violent relations, and feminist
practice] (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1993).

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 S I G N S Autumn 2008 ❙ 203

also deserves to be mentioned. For instance, a man accused of aggression

against his wife excuses himself in the delegacia, saying that he was not
beating his wife but rather defending himself against Oxossi, a masculine
deity of the hunt, who took possession of her. She also terms the ideology
of female superiority professed by the baianas (Bahian women) as Ian-
sãismo, after Iansã, the Afro-Brazilian goddess who is “the fierce controller
of storms” (67), to contrast it with the so-called Marianismo, which refers
to the Virgin Mary’s influence throughout Latin America.
More to the point, however, is her valiant discussion of “the myth of
classlessness of domestic violence” (34). Avoiding the pitfalls of reading
class as race, or race as culture, Hautzinger offers a lucid analysis of the
fact that “the stresses that poverty generates hold significance for the
patterning of domestic violence” (35). In so doing, she also points to the
importance of family networks, and of women in these networks, for
concurring with aggression against women. Her splendid description of
a festival held on Saint John’s Day, in which boys and girls, mocking a
forced marriage in a square dance, slap and kiss each other, is a sad re-
minder of the ways in which children get prepared to act their roles later
as adults. But twenty years after her first visit to Brazil, and contrary to
the impression of her earlier works, she feels confident enough to conclude
her book on an optimistic note on the delegacias, reporting a “steady
progress in this newly reborn democracy’s bold experiment” (265).
In a way, each book is a complement of the other in that both give a
clear picture about the race wars going on in academe and in other fields:
the battles of those who would like to see the Brazilian situation in large
strokes of black and white against those who are looking to the myriad
situations that may divide, as well as connect, people along color, or
gender, lines, more often than not combined with other social markers.
Qualities and failures from one side may be seen as failures and qualities
from the other—but no reader from this side of America will be aloof at
this scene. ❙

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