Affects of Resistance: Candomblé Rituals in Contemporary Brazilian Fiction

Collective rituals are representative and phenomenological sites of religious affects. These rituals counter colonial discourses, facilitating the interaction of folk-festive African cultures with hegemonic Catholicism to fashion Afro-Brazilian identity. These folk elements resist the hegemony of objectivism in religious practices, especially in previously colonized societies like Brazil. The traditional religions of the Afro-Brazilians have been delegitimized by colonial regulations that aimed at suppressing embodied emotions and its public expressions. In Brazil, candomblé is a religious ceremony that signifies syncretism in which the spirits of ancestors and natural phenomena are invoked by Healers, in spaces that transcend the public/private binary. These eco-ancestral rituals emerge as sites of expressive emotions in which the drumming, singing, and dancing bodies of the performers are embedded. The proposed paper situates the candomblé rituals in Crooked Plow (2023), a contemporary Brazilian novel, within the socio-cultural and political matrices of the plantation communities of the twentieth century. The novel is set in a colonial plantation in Bahai, a Northeastern province in Brazil, where plantations owned by Portuguese colonisers operationalized tenant farming, installing slaves brought in from Africa during the Transatlantic trade as bonded labourers. The paper examines how Afro-Brazilian religious rituals facilitate political mobilization and agential potentialities using insights from affect theory.