UC San Diego

In Brazil, images and ideas of Africa have been historically linked to the northeastern state of Bahia, more specifically with the former colonial capital and port city of Salvador. While the city boasts a dense population of people of African or mixed African and European descent, a powerful way that Bahia's blackness has historically been confirmed and perpetuated has been through the continued reproduction of symbols of Africa, both stigmatized and valorized. An essential and insightful medium through which this Bahian Africa can be seen clearly in Salvador is through the city's dance culture. This master's thesis analyzes the way imagined African symbols have been consumed, appropriated, and authenticated through particular embodied dance forms in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. This imagined Africa, while both feared and adored, has been effectively re-imagined, consumed, and performed many times in Bahia. This consumption of imagined symbols--both traditional and local, as well as exotic and African--has and continues to solidify stereotypes of Africa as a symbolic form loaded with complex and often contradictory notions of authenticity, one that can be seen as a powerful simulacrum with a life of its own, potentially devoid of any true origin