Candomblé, centered in Brazil’s most African city, Salvador da Bahia, is famous for its spectacular performances at which divinities of West African origin assume human form. It also poses a central enigma of Brazilian society. In a nation with long aspirations to European modernity, this most African of Brazilian spirit-possession religions, espousing African identity and ritual purity, is popular in all sectors of society and has become a central symbol of Brazilian national identity. Generations of interpreters have sought answers to this enigma within the racial, political, religious, and cultural transformations of Brazil. Now, in Black Atlantic Religion, J. Lorand Matory repositions the study of Candomblé within the Afro-Atlantic diaspora and transnational processes of Black Atlantic cultural creation.

Such a reframing is overdue. Candomblé is now part of a self-consciously transnational Yoruba religious world. By focusing on transformations in Candomblé ritual practice and identity, Matory makes a compelling case for analyzing them historically as part of ongoing dialogues among peoples of the Atlantic fringe, fed in the postslavery period by transatlantic commerce and travel among Africans and their Brazilian descendants. In Brazil, African identities and practices have often been interpreted as expressions of resistance to white hegemony, but Matory argues that by relocating Candomblé within the framework of the Afro-Atlantic world, these identities and the rituals they engender emerge as broader strategies for survival and success.

With extensive fieldwork and archival research in Brazil on Candomblé and in Nigeria on its Yoruba counterparts, a command of both Yoruba and Portuguese, and a nose for historical sleuthing, Matory is well positioned for this enterprise. His personal and intellectual locations are also critical. Arguing as a black scholar against the Eurocentrism of the majority of researchers, he provides thought-provoking, sometimes controversial, new perspectives on their contributions, reexamining Candomblé within an analytic framework of work by African and African American scholars. He exposes the fallacy that Candomblé evolved from any single moment or that it is a frozen form of some West African original and argues for “the impure roots of purity” (p. 121), a commitment to transnational ideas of purity within what has been a continuous and mutually influential creative reworking of ritual practice on both sides of the Atlantic. Candomblé’s forebears in Nigeria and Benin have exhibited dynamism similar to that in Brazil, with contests over ethnic and religious “purity” often embedded in British and French imperialist struggles. In Lagos during the 1890s, which Matory identifies as marking a cultural renaissance, defense of the “purity” of Yoruba culture, religion, and language became a weapon against British racism. This quest for purity, exported to Brazil, became popular in the 1920s and 1930s and has remained so, buttressed by the activities of international merchants of African products, by internal competition among variants of Candomblé, and by recent pressure from international Yoruba religious sources. Ironically, even though purity and fidelity to African practice have remained central to the most prestigious of Candomblé forms, Nagô, Matory found it to be of little concern in the Yoruba town of his 1980s fieldwork, an area of major influence on the Nagô tradition in Brazil.

His chapter on the Jéjé variant of Candomblé, whose adherents trace the “purity” of its traditions to Dahomey (now Benin), makes even more radical claims: Matory speculates that Jéjé identity and practices, attributed to West African origins, actually originated in Bahia, were carried to Benin, where they influenced Beninese ethnicity, and then, further modified, were reintroduced into Brazil.

Black Atlantic Religion is convincing in broad outline and in particular arguments but is sometimes flawed by claims and assertions that exceed the data. One chapter in particular, on Ruth Landes, verges on stridency. Elsewhere, Matory aptly emphasizes African agency against interpretations of Afro-Brazilians’ passive submission to white elites. In this chapter, however, he reverses himself to argue that Landes, a U.S. ethnographer of Candomblé in the 1930s, guided by her Western feminist perspective, single-handedly and decisively influenced the future of this religion. Matory claims that by incorrectly identifying the religion as matriarchal and characterizing male participants possessed by divinities as homosexuals, Landes actually brought this situation about, an implausible assertion argued on the thinnest of evidence. He also falls prey to the very African “purist” bias whose history he deconstructs, privileging in his analysis the few “purist” Candomblé centers over the many more eclectic ones and referring to Umbanda, an eclectic religion that draws at least as much on European spiritism as on African sources, as simply “a watered-down version of Candomblé” (p. 165).

There is a great deal to praise here. Matory offers new historical data and original perspectives as well as a passionate critique of the neglect of the Afro-Atlantic world in recent transnationalist theory. The historical detail and immersion in ongoing controversies will delight scholars but will make this book difficult for introductory undergraduate courses.