Colonial Churches and the Rise of the Quintessential Black City: Modernism, Travel, and the Pathbreaking Guide of Jorge Amado

As a young author who would later become one of Brazil’s most translated and most widely sold novelists, Jorge Amado dedicated himself to an unorthodox tourist guide for Salvador in the last years of World War II.¹ In his meandering text Amado sought simultaneously to attract new visitors to a romanticized, festive Black city and also to denounce the city’s social problems. Veering between the practical and the literary, with vivid evocations of African drums permeating the night, Amado’s guide led the way in billing Blackness as one of Salvador’s chief attractions. His narration was paired with illustrations by a