“SAMBA IN THIS CAPITAL HAS NOT YET BEEN EXTINGUISHED” - QUILOMBOLA LEISURE, CITY AND BLACK LOVE IN SALVADOR

Abstract

This article analyzes samba in Salvador, Bahia, during the first decades of the twentieth century, as a practice of quilombola leisure. Drawing on newspaper chronicles, press records, and works by Jorge Amado, it discusses how samba produced Black territories of freedom amid discourses of surveillance, moralization, and urban control. The central argument is that samba operated as an ancestral technology of collective existence, articulating body, territory, memory, care, joy, and love. In dialogue with Beatriz Nascimento, Lélia Gonzalez, Abdias Nascimento, and bell hooks, the article reads samba circles, popular festivities, hillsides, houses, streets, and terreiros as spaces of Black reterritorialization. Even when crossed by exoticism, moralism, and repression, the sources reveal practices of sociability, communal repair, and urban invention. Thus, samba is understood as a form of urban quilombismo, capable of reinventing time and space through presence, rhythm, and sharing.