BRAZILIAN RACE RELATIONS, FRENCH SOCIAL SCIENTISTS, AND AFRICAN DECOLONIZATION: A TRANSATLANTIC HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF MISCEGENATION

Abstract

AbstractThis article analyzes how debates concerning Brazilian race relations, miscegenation, and racial democracy unfolded in France in the 1950s. During those years, Gilberto Freyre and those critical of him emerged in French social scientific discourse, offering distinct visions concerning race, culture, and the possibility of harmonious coexistence in a world structured by racial, social, and colonial inequalities. Certain French social scientists such as Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel embraced Freyre's vision as a possible source for racial and cultural mixing, whereas others, especially Alfred Métraux and Florestan Fernandes, directly criticized his work. Roger Bastide mediated between the two, translating Freyre's Casa-Grande & Senzala and coauthoring a UNESCO-based study on blacks and whites in São Paulo that largely repudiated Freyre's claims. I argue that in a period in which decolonization was already underway, Freyre piqued the interest of French social scientists looking to overcome the growing antagonism between colonizer and colonized, even if other models of cultural integration and autonomy contested the validity of Brazil's so-called racial democracy.