THE “CORDIAL MAN”: A LATIN AMERICAN CONCEPT IN THE BRAZILIAN ESSAY

Pedro Meira Monteiro

doi:10.1590/2596-304x20202241pmm

Abstract

Abstract: This article analyzes Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Roots of Brazil (1936), a seminal book in the Brazilian essayist tradition. Discussion begins with the limits of Brazil’s search for national specificity, so as to consider Brazilian cultural formation as a projection of its colonial Iberian roots. In this context, the “cordial man” emerges as a metaphor for the lack of public space in Brazil. On the one hand, the cordial man is a product of turn-of-the-century debates on Latin American exceptionalism, a figure almost capable of withstanding the disillusions of the modern world. On the other hand, the cordial man offers Buarque de Holanda a window into the limits of democratic liberalism and the personalistic political traditions of Latin America: an impasse discussed at length but never resolved in Roots of Brazil. Ultimately, the book permits a deeper questioning of the collective pulses and individual desires that, together, form the matter to which populism would respond, a political form temporarily capable of meeting the people’s demands.

Highlights

This article analyzes Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Roots of Brazil (1936), a seminal book in the Brazilian essayist tradition
The essay is a literary genre with wide appeal and great intellectual importance in Brazilian history
This marked the formation of what Alexandre Eulalio has called the “Brazilian mentality deeply unsatisfied with the present reality” (56), at a moment when the cultural field served as a stage for the exchange of ideas

Summary

Introduction

This article analyzes Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Roots of Brazil (1936), a seminal book in the Brazilian essayist tradition. It was in this context — caught between the search for specificity and a genre that was slowly becoming open to imprecision — that the historian and literary critic Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902-1982) wrote Roots of Brazil, a work that would eventually join the pantheon of great Brazilian essays.

Results

Conclusion