Faculty Spotlight: Kim Butler (Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Rutgers-New Brunswick)

Professor Kim Butler has been named a recipient of the 2025 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship 

Professor Kim D. Butler (Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Rutgers New-Brunswick, and Project Director of Insurgent Intersections: Combating Global Anti-Blackness, one of the first funded research projects at the ISGRJ) has been named a 2025 recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to complete a book on Black Power as it expressed itself through Black carnival groups known as Blocos Afros.

Blocos Afros are a distinct form of carnival performance created in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil during the nation’s last military dictatorship (1964-1985) when a group of young people founded Ilê Aiyê (loosely, “House of the World” in Yoruba). In the carnival of 1975, this exclusively Black group scandalized a society that asserted itself as a racial democracy, parading with signs proclaiming “Black World,” “Blacks for You” and (in English) “Black Power.” Dozens of others soon followed; these were neighborhood-based groups promoting black cultural pride, history, and politics during their Carnival processions, and providing social services throughout the year through youth activities and economic opportunities. At their height of popularity in the 1980s, they featured percussion sections sometimes over 100 strong. Hundreds of masqueraders paraded in African-themed costumes and sang original compositions about black experience. Elected queens of the blocos floated above the crowd on flatbed trucks dancing movements created especially for this style of Carnival. Made internationally famous by such artists as Michael Jackson and Paul Simon, blocos became an integral part of Carnival, the state’s cultural identity, and tourism. 

In the 1970s, however, blocos were seen as a threat to the elite narrative that there racism did not exist in Brazil.  Propelled to creatively negotiate the constraints of a military dictatorship, blocos afros found unique ways to articulate a popular vision of liberation encompassing an end to racial, sexual, economic and gender discrimination. At the same time, they constructed a counter-discourse that celebrated the very identities most disparaged in Brazilian society. In a moment when it seemed that the dominant classes held all-encompassing power, young Black teens created a powerful way to dismantle oppression—all to the exuberant rhythms of Carnival.

Kim Butler has written extensively about the African carnival clubs that first appeared shortly after Brazil became the last American nation to abolish slavery in 1888, and has been researching the clubs of the 1970s and 80s over the past decade. 

See below for some images from the 2024 Ilê Aiyê 50th Anniversary Carnival: