A Bahian counterpoint of sugar and oil: global commodities, global identities?

Abstract

This paper explores the effects of sugar and oil on identity formation or, more specifically, on the making of blackness and whiteness in the region surrounding Salvador, Bahia, where both commodities have had great impact, sugar from 1550 and oil from 1950, when drilling for oil began and a very large oil refinery was built. After comparing life under the economy of these two different commodities I connect them to the issue of a transnational black identity created across the Atlantic, drawing from a common past of slavery and a more recent past and present where racial hierarchies still penalize populations defined as black. This part of Bahia is emblematic for other regions of Brazil and other countries in which oil exploitation comes to substitute other mono-cultures (such as sugarcane, cocoa or small-scale fishing) while creating, often quite suddenly, a wholly different local economy, with new global connections, higher salaries, new conspicuous spending patterns, new values associated with certain forms of manual labour and technical skills, and an altogether new form of defining the nature of a "good job".