Introduction

Abstract

Portuguese Studies vol. 27 no. 1 (2011), 5–7© Modern Humanities Research Association 2011 Introduction Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke The Brazilian Ambassador in London, His Excellency Carlos Augusto SantosNeves , had the excellent idea of holding a ‘Gilberto Freyre week’ in November 2009, along the lines of an earlier ‘Guimarães Rosa week’. The event took place partly in the Embassy and partly in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s College London. It is scarcely necessary to remind readers of this journal of the central importance of Gilberto Freyre (1900–87) in twentieth-century Brazilian culture. He has a good claim to be regarded not only as a leading social thinker and historian but also as the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Brazil. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalist, a cultural critic, a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, a novelist, poet and artist. Like Lewis Mumford, whose work he admired, he was a ‘generalist’ rather than a specialist. Freyre’scareer,whichwasrichincomplexityandcontroversies,canbedescribed as oscillating over the decades between ‘canonization’ and ‘excommunication’. His achievements have been assessed in very different ways, including praises and criticisms that often tend to simplify and ignore his many paradoxes and ambiguities. Freyre is best known as the author of Casa-grande e senzala (1933), a study of the patriarchal family in the colonial period, especially on the sugar plantations of the Northeast. This highly original contribution to social history helped Brazilians to define their identity by emphasizing the importance of both miscegenation and cultural mixing in their past. Casa-grande also enjoyed a popular success that few history books can match. Besides more than forty editions in Portuguese and translations into nine other languages, this study has been ‘translated’ into a comic book and a television mini-series, while two directors (one of them Roberto Rossellini) planned to turn it into a film. Freyre’s many books — two of which will be discussed in some detail below — include a pioneering study of environmental history (Nordeste, 1937); an unorthodox textbook of sociology (Sociologia, 1945), in which he suggested that the most important contributions to the subject had been produced by great novelists such as Proust; and a history of late nineteenth-century Brazil (Ordem e Progresso, 1959), based in part on the replies to a questionnaire he sent to a thousand Brazilians born between 1850 and 1900. Freyre’s contributions to social theory include the idea of ‘Lusotropicalism’ (discussed by Bethencourt below), arguing that the sixteenth-century Portuguese were unusually well fitted for the task of colonization, whether in Africa, Asia or Brazil, thanks to their unusual adaptability to different climates and cultures. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke 6 More relevant to today’s problems, however, are his ideas about miscegenation and hybridity. Whether or not we support quotas for ‘blacks’ in Brazilian universities, whether or not we think that ‘mixed-race’ should be or become an official category, Freyre remains a reference point in the debate. Looking beyond Brazil, in an age of racist revival and racist violence, it appears that the world still has something to learn from Gilberto Freyre’s ‘mixophilia’ and his encouragement of harmony and fraternity. The programme for the Gilberto Freyre week, appropriately enough in the case of homage to a ‘generalist’, drew on scholars from three different disciplines: history, literature and anthropology. It included three lectures, by Professor Jeffrey Needell, University of Florida; Professor Ricardo Benzaquen, Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro: and Dr Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. Needell’s general survey of Freyre’s life and work, which serves as an introduction to the collection, stresses what he calls the ‘profoundly reactionary’ side of Freyre. By contrast, Pallares-Burke, focusing on a single book by Freyre, the important if neglected study Ingleses no Brasil, emphasizes its innovative features, while Benzaquen draws attention to Freyre’s literary art in an analysis of his collection of ghost stories, Assombrações do Recife Velho. In order to consider Freyre’s continuing relevance in the twenty-first century, a round table was devoted to the subject of cultural hybridity, a theme close to Freyre...