Afro-paradise: blackness, violence, and performance in Brazil

Tourists exult in Bahia, Brazil, as a tropical paradise infused with the black population's one-of-a-kind vitality.

But the alluring images of smiling black faces and dancing black bodies masks an ugly reality of anti-black authoritarian violence.

This work argues that the dialectic of glorified representations of black bodies and subsequent state repression reinforces Brazil's racially hierarchal society.