Black Magic City: How Gods, Money, and Healing Shaped Rio de Janeiro

In Black Magic City, Ana Paulina Lee tells the untold story of how “black magic” became one of modern Brazil’s most dangerous and revealing phrases for governing life after slavery. Drawing on criminal trials, archives, literature, and anthropology, Lee shows how authorities turned ritual into evidence, sacred objects into contraband, healing into crime, and care into fraud. Lee restores the worlds that policing tried and failed to contain: women who read cards and palms, Afro-Brazilian healers who offered protection and counsel, migrants searching for spiritual aid, and writers who saw magic as one of the hidden engines of modern life. Lee offers a vivid new history of religion, race, law, and urban power in Brazil and reveals how accusations of black magic helped define the boundaries of freedom, labor, sexuality, and religious legitimacy after slavery. At once a story of repression and survival, Black Magic City shows how modern Rio was made through battles over who could heal, who could believe, and who had the power to decide what counted as crime.