The party color - co-optation and resistance: the black citizenship building spaces in the Bahia Carnival

Abstract

Although settled in a cultural repertory with african origins, the carnival has always showed social-ethnic-cultural segmentation refleting the systematic racial and cultural intolerance of the local elites. Oscilating between co-option or exclusion, the participation of black people has always represented an explicit refusal to the ides of a simple inversion or annulment of the daily inequalities, providing, thus, the dramatization of a wish of social equality and the realization that it doesn't exist.