Untitled
G I L B E R T O F R E Y R E
The Reassessment Continues
David Lehmann
University of Cambridge
Gilberto Freyre e os estudos latino-americanos. Edited by Joshua Lund
and Malcolm McNee. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura
Iberoamericana, Universidad de Pittsburgh, 2006. Pp. 399.
Casa-grande e senzala. By Gilberto Freyre. Critical edition by Guillermo
Giucci, Enrique Rodríguez Larreta, and Edson Nery da Fonseca.
Madrid: Acordo Archivos ALLCA XX, 2002. Pp. 1297.
Gilberto Freyre: um vitoriano dos tropicos. By Maria Lúcia Garcia
Pallares-Burke. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2005. Pp. 484.
Casa-grande e senzala was published when Freyre, born in 1900, was
only thirty-three years old. This precocious book dealt with a vast range
of themes and a variety of sources, and its largely non-Brazilian intellec-
tual precursors were beyond the physical and even intellectual range of
Freyre’s contemporaries, few of whom had traveled to the United States
or even to Europe, as Freyre had done in the early and late 1920s. The
mere length of the book, as Thomas Skidmore has noted, put off estab-
lished publishers. Casa-grande probably drew on all the then-published
historical writing on Brazil in Portuguese, English, and French, as well as
on comparative medical and anatomical studies, travel literature, ethnog-
raphies of different parts of Africa, and published colonial reports, plus
a sprinkling of quasi-ethnographic personal reminiscence. Already at
that age, Freyre, though himself from an urban professional, rather than
landholding, family, deployed his trademark patrician assuredness. He
invented his own genre—a propensity for ex cathedra pronouncements
and self-glorifi cation, combined with an intellectual curiosity at once un-
disciplined and creative.
At fi rst, as the essays in the volume edited by Lund and McNee often
remind us, Freyre’s book had the effect of an earthquake, though admit-
tedly in a very small intellectual elite. In 2001, Antonio Candido recalled
a friend from the left-wing branch of a prominent political family going
to the mirror on reading it and musing, “Acho que sou mulato!” (Lund
and McNee, 10). Lilia Schwarz elaborates by reminding us in the same
Latin American Research Review, Vol. 43, No. 1. © 2008 by the Latin American Studies Association.
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REVIEW ESSAYS 209
collection that the Estado Novo itself fell under the infl uence of Freyre,
implementing offi cial projects in which mestiçagem (racial mixture) was
recognized as “a verdadeira nacionalidade,” Brazil’s true nationality (314),
although on this one might also fi nd contrary evidence, notably the noto-
rious case of the sculpture “O homem brasileiro,” by Celso Antonio.1
Whatever individuals’ disposition toward the black population and the
poor, the climate of public debate in Brazil at the time started from the
assumption that the black skin and African descent of a large portion of
the population was in some sense a problem; Freyre on the contrary told
them it was a solution. Freyre had little knowledge of or interest in the
recent European immigrants who were fl ooding into the South; for him
the Portuguese were not white at all, their mestiço heritage shaped by cen-
turies of Arab presence among them. Clearly Casa-grande is written by a
confi dent member of the Northeastern elite, but is it written by a “white
man”? In a telling passage quoted by Neil Larsen (Lund and McNee, 382),
Freyre evokes almost voluptuously the black infl uence in “everything that
is a sincere expression of life . . . the tenderness, the exaggerated mimicry,
the Catholicism that indulges our senses, music, language, gait and the
lullabies . . . the escrava who nursed us and fed us and told us our fi rst
children’s horror stories, the mulata who so deliciously extracted the fi rst
splinter from our feet and, fi nally and inevitably, the woman who initi-
ated us into the delights of physical love and gave us our fi rst sense of
male completeness, to the creaking sounds of the chaise lounge” (Freyre,
301, my translation). Who is—or are—this “us”? The writer is refl ected
impersonally in the text like the artist in Velázquez’s Las Meninas.
Freyre is often credited—or blamed—for coining and spreading the
myth of “racial democracy.” It is repeated with particular insistence, near
unanimity, and no small dose of righteous indignation among those whom
Brazilian writers describe as Brazilianists—not, note, Brazilianistas—as well
as by several Brazilian authorities. In a 1996 article, George Reid Andrews
(the quality of whose work on race in Brazil is otherwise not in doubt)
seems to refer the reader to the 1946 English translation of Casa-grande in
support of the claim that Freyre coined the term, but I could fi nd no such
1. Although commissioned for the modernist Ministry of Education building in Rio de
Janeiro, this sculpture was cancelled by Gustavo Capanema, Vargas’s powerful minister
of education, because the sculptor did not agree with Capanema’s Arian conception of the
typical Brazilian. The work, which was meant to be twelve meters high, was never fi nished,
and the model was destroyed in what some regard as a suspicious accident. The correspon-
dence and an instructive newspaper article from the Correio da Manhã (23 September 1938)
are reproduced in Mauricio Lissovsky and Paulo Sergio Moraes de Sá, Colunas da educação:
a construção do Ministério da Educação e Saúde (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto do Patrimonio Histó-
rico e Artístico Nacional, 1996), 224–237.
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210 Latin American Research Review
thing on the page quoted! 2 More recently, to take but one of innumerable
examples, Robin Sheriff states that Casa-grande “reconstituted the country
as a democracia racial.” 3 Thankfully, in a 2002 paper published on the Inter-
net, Levy Cruz provides the results of what must be the most exhaustive
effort so far to uncover whether and when Freyre used the expression.4
The results are a testimony to Cruz’s archaeological talents on the one
hand, and unfortunately, on the other, to the capacity of academics some-
times to believe and propagate a malign fi ction, like a slow-motion lynch
mob. Cruz fi rst reminds us not only that the belief has been attributed to
Freyre that Brazil is a racial democracy, but also that he has been blamed
for perpetuating racial discrimination in Brazil on account of the false
consciousness engendered by the myth! But then he goes on to show de-
cisively that there is not a single instance where Freyre stated that Brazil is
a racial democracy. He did state several times, though mostly in lectures
and statements for English-speaking audiences, that Brazil might be on a
path toward an “ethnic or racial democracy,” and in the English transla-
tion of Sobrados e mucambos, he inserted in an additional fi nal sentence the
statement that “Brazil is becoming more and more a racial democracy,
characterized by an almost unique combination of diversity and unity.” 5
The nearest he gets in Portuguese is in an interview from 1980 published
very obscurely in Recife,6 when he says that Brazil is far from a pure de-
mocracy in any sense (“racial, social or political”) but “is the nearest thing
in the world to a racial democracy.” It is worth noting that here he uses the
expression democracia relativa, which had fi gured in the vocabulary of the
military government during its prolonged and tortuous “decompression”
of the mid- to late 1970s. Freyre might have helped his own reputation on
the left—if that had mattered to him—and among social scientists gener-
ally had he taken more care with his use of terms; but let us not forget how
2. George Reid Andrews, “Brazilian Racial Democracy, 1900–90: An American Counter-
point,” Journal of Contemporary History 31 (1996): 487. At the expense of appearing pedantic,
while Andrews says that Freyre directly contrasted Brazilian racial democracy to Nazi rac-
ism, the original text in fact refers to social democracy. See Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and
the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1986), xii. This is a reproduction in paperback of the second edition of Samuel
Putnam’s translation of 1946, with (yet another) new preface by Freyre and an introduction
by David Maybury-Lewis. For Andrews’s work on race, see his Blacks and Whites in São
Paulo, Brazil 1888–1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
3. Robin Sheriff, Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil (New Bruns-
wick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 5.
4. Levy Cruz, “Democracia racial: uma hypótese” (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco,
2002), http://www.fundaj.gov.br/tpd/128.html.
5. Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties: The Making of Modern Brazil, trans. Har-
riet de Onís (New York: Knopf, 1963), 431.
6. Lêda Rivas, Parceiros do tempo (Recife: Editora Universitaria, 1980). This interview is
reproduced in part by Cruz.
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REVIEW ESSAYS 211
much he became a political animal, more concerned to navigate differ-
ent currents of opinion than to achieve analytical coherence. Indeed, one
source of the “racial democracy” imbroglio is his practice of projecting
different personae at home and abroad: a study of Freyre’s management of
his translations and of his persona outside Brazil (para inglês ver . . .) would
be of great interest. Overall, however, one can well sympathize with Her-
mano Vianna’s outburst about “the myth of the myth of racial democracy”
(quoted in Lund and McNee, 40).
Already in 1978, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in an article in Brazilian
Vogue no less, refl ected the transition in Freyre’s reputation and in his own
career, as Cardoso, at the time one of the most representative fi gures of a
marxisant generation of intellectuals, was migrating from the academic to
the political arena. Despite reservations about Freyre’s hidden prejudices
and reactionary inclinations, Cardoso expresses admiration for him as a
“myth-maker”: Casa-grande, he follows, “will continue to sail on . . . borne
along on the sails of our own mythologized idea of ourselves, of Brazil,
which is necessary to shape our national identity.” 7 In retrospect, we can
see how these remarks, rediscovered by Raúl Antelo (in Lund and McNee,
74), foreshadow a softening of the ideological atmosphere and also the
beginnings of a concern with issues of identity that has marked Brazilian
and most Latin American debates since about 1990. Was Cardoso himself
not the fi rst president of Brazil to recognize the reality of racial discrimi-
nation and to give offi cial support to affi rmative action?8
So Brazilian social scientists began once again to evoke Freyre’s name
with respect, giving rise to new commentaries9 and to the monumental
scholarly edition of Casa-grande edited by Giucci, Rodríguez Larreta and
Nery da Fonseca, complete with all the prefaces, a history of the book’s
reception at home and abroad, and contributions from leading Brazilians
such as Darcy Ribeiro as well as from Roland Barthes, Fernand Braudel,
and Lucien Febvre. There have been some noteworthy U-turns: Peter Fry
issued a mea culpa after twenty-fi ve years; Stuart Schwartz, the historian
of slavery in the Northeast did likewise.10 The “esquerda festiva” of the
7. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “A espera de Grande industria e favela,” Senhor/Vogue,
no. 2 (May 1978): 115–121, original emphasis.
8. Mala Htun, “From Racial Democracy to Affi rmative Action: Changing State Policy on
Race in Brazil,” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 1 (2004): 60–89.
9. Notably Ricardo Benzaquen de Araújo: Guerra e Paz: Casa Grande e Senzala e a obra de
Gilberto Freyre nos anos 30 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1994); and Joaquím Falcão and Rosa
Barboza de Araújo, eds., O imperador das idéias: Gilberto Freyre em questão (Rio de Janeiro:
Fundação Roberto Marinho/Top Books, 2001).
10. Peter Fry, “ ‘Feijoada e soul food’ 25 anos depois,” in A persistencia da raça: ensaios antro-
pológicos sobre o Brasil e a Africa austral (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaçao Brasileira, 2005), 147–148;
Stuart Schwartz, “Gilberto Freyre e a historia colonial: uma visão otimista do Brasil,” in O
imperador das idéias, 101–117.
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212 Latin American Research Review
1960s and 1970s, as Carlos Lacerda sardonically called them,11 are making
their peace with this “other” they once despised and dismissed as a de-
fender of the old order. Lund and McNee’s volume refl ects this well, for it
is written by authors from a later generation who with perhaps one excep-
tion seem quite comfortable with Freyre: if they disagree or criticize, they
do so without a sharp edge of political or generational rancor—unlike the
Brazilianists mentioned above.
Freyre shares with the other great theorists of Brazil the idea of hy-
bridity and of the porousness, the almost nonexistence, in their country
of the public–private divide. Lilia Schwarz (McNee and Lund, 325) enu-
merates the instances when Buarque de Holanda, DaMatta, José de Souza
Martins, and Roberto Schwarz, like Freyre, emphasized this, together
with the indistinct legal status of the individual in the face of the state or
law, especially in Brazil’s more unruly, or simply unruled, hinterland. All
these fuzzy frontiers, now so fashionable in writing on issues of identity,
of literary style, and of sexuality, can, metonymically at least, be conjoined
to Freyre, who managed somehow to sing the praises of mixture while
making promiscuous use of ethnic, racial, national, and geographical
labeling.
On the other hand, the privatization of power—a central issue in the
understanding of Brazilian politics at all levels for generations and espe-
cially in Freyre’s own Northeast—goes unmentioned in an account that
sees in the patriarchal family the crucible of a civilized level of racial coex-
istence but omits the coronelismo of patriarchal politics. It is not by accident
that Freyre does not, in Casa-grande, translate his virulent and detailed
denunciation of the effects of the latifundio and its accompanying mon-
oculture on nutrition, health, and ecology (70, 104–105) into a description,
let alone analysis, of the mechanisms of state power that perpetuated it.
That would have come too close to an attribution of responsibility to iden-
tifi able political families, threatening his status as Recife’s supra-political
guru.
When he came to write Casa-grande, Freyre had no doubts about the
existence of racial differences of habit, character, and attitudes to nature,
and regarded these (after Franz Boas) as the cultural product of long-
term climatic, economic, and ecological adaptations, miscegenations, con-
quests, and migrations, adopting something like a folk ethnology. Lund
and McNee speak in their introduction of the notions of race and culture
playing hide-and-seek (10), and in their collection several commentators
describe Freyre’s approach as “neo-lamarckian.” Laura Cavalcante Padilha
remarks how in later chapters of Casa-grande Freyre portrays a hierarchy
of slaves in which more recent arrivals are kept in the fi elds while “the
11. Carlos Lacerda, Depoimento, ed. Claudio Lacerda Paiva (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fron-
teira, 1977), 196.
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REVIEW ESSAYS 213
cleanest, the prettiest and the strongest” are “promoted” to domestic ser-
vice (150). But Freyre utterly and eloquently rejected the use of cultural
differences to explain, let alone justify, differences in economic well-being
and achievement. He also repeatedly denounced the evils of slavery and
monoculture, and readily acknowledged the deleterious effect of slave ex-
perience on the post-abolition fate of the black populations of the Western
Hemisphere. Today’s readers must reconcile Freyre’s references to sexual
abuse and sadism as an inevitable corollary of slavery, to the prevalence
of syphilis, to the atrocious nutrition of the Brazilian family, and to the
nefarious effects of land concentration in the Northeast (compared to São
Paulo) with his other remarks about the intimacy and lubricity of relations
in the slave house. They must also absorb the idea that Portuguese men
were oversexed in any case and captive to an image inherited from their
contact with the Saracens: “the delicious brown-skinned and dark-eyed
Moorish enchantress enveloped in sexual mysticism” (38). As Ricardo
Benzaquen de Araújo observes, Freyre knowingly leaves these contradic-
tions unresolved (Freyre, 1058).
The book by Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke about Freyre’s early intellec-
tual development continues this relatively recent scholarly interest and
brings both new material and new perspectives to the subject. It prob-
ably also sets a new standard in Brazilian intellectual history because of
the thoroughness of the research and the author’s remarkable talent as a
highly erudite literary detective ranging across European and Brazilian
literature. This is not the fi rst time Pallares-Burke has applied this talent:
she once demonstrated that large chunks of a magazine of social commen-
tary published in Recife in the 1830s and 1840s were in fact lifted from the
eighteenth-century London Spectator, and she also showed that the fi rst
translation published in Brazil of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman (1792) was in fact a translation of an anonymous—and
itself partially plagiarized—pamphlet of 1739! 12
The fascination of Pallares-Burke’s book lies in its intricate documenta-
tion of the sequence of Freyre’s infl uences and, as a result, its demonstra-
tion of their incoherence; for they emerge as uneven, haphazard, and ill-
digested. The intellectual trajectory uncovered by Pallares-Burke—which
resembles island-hopping more than a trajectory—casts Freyre in a new
light by questioning the whole notion of infl uence in his work: do the
many authors whom he mentions really infl uence him by affecting his ap-
proach and his analysis, or is he rather invoking them and sprinkling his
text with their names? Freyre quotes Spengler, Fustel de Coulanges, Her-
12. Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, “A Spectator in the Tropics: A Case Study in the Pro-
duction and Reproduction of Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (1994):
676–701; Nisia Floresta, O carapuceiro e outros ensaios de tradução cultural (São Paulo: Editora
Hucitec, 1996).
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214 Latin American Research Review
bert Spencer, and Weber incidentally, never Marx! Certainly no one has
yet claimed that he engages with any of them in an even half-sustained
way. But Pallares-Burke does establish the leading infl uences: certain Bra-
zilians, notably the antiracist anthropologist Roquette-Pinto and the dip-
lomat Oliveira Lima, did encourage him intellectually and career-wise.
Franz Boas was the fi rst to shift him from racial to cultural labeling, and
Freyre loved invoking him and his period as his student. Pallares-Burke
makes a major discovery about the role of the sad but erudite German
scholar Ruediger Bilden, whom Freyre met in New York. Bilden had
the grand idea of writing a comparative study of slavery and race in the
Americas, but his career never took off; he did, however, teach Freyre the
importance of the economic basis of plantation society. Freyre emerges
from Pallares-Burke’s book as a voracious but indiscriminate reader and
listener, easily moved by the opinions and works of individuals who ap-
pealed to him.
As is well known, Freyre left Brazil for the United States at the age
of eighteen, studying at the Baptist Baylor University in Texas and pro-
ceeding in 1921 to Columbia, where he spent two years before going to
England, France, and then Portugal. At twenty he was a correspondent
for the Diario de Pernambuco. His intellectual trajectory is traced with care
bordering on devotion by Pallares-Burke, who has revealed the turning
point in Freyre’s life represented by his brief period as a sort of intellec-
tual tourist in Oxford in 1922—hence the book’s title. She pinpoints one
or two moments when Freyre steered himself away from his own prior
assumptions and those prevalent in Brazil in the 1920s. One apparent
turning point was the scandal over the award of the Prix Goncourt to the
Martiniquais writer René Maran in 1922, which Freyre wrote about in the
Diario de Pernambuco even before traveling from New York to Paris, ex-
pressing his indignation at the bigoted opposition to the verdict, praising
the book’s anti-colonial and antiracist message, yet describing the author
as a “a pure black man with such a snub nose that people are astonished
to see a pince-nez perched upon it!” (305). Yet four years later he was still
expressing admiration for the traditions of the Deep South, writing with
benevolence about the Ku Klux Klan and its colorful rituals in the name,
inter alia, of showing Pernambuco sugar planters the way to technical
progress. This twenty-something-year-old was in a state of constant intel-
lectual disponibilité.
In fact, Freyre’s reminiscences seem designed both to demonstrate that
he had experienced a type of conversion away from a prejudiced outlook
and also to confuse us all as to when it happened. For example, both
Pallares-Burke and Lund and McNee in their introductory essay recall
Freyre’s account of a moment, in about 1922, when he saw a group of Bra-
zilian sailors in Brooklyn—or was it on the Brooklyn Bridge? At the time,
as he later recalled in the opening pages of the preface to Casa-grande,
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REVIEW ESSAYS 215
they had reminded him of an (unknown) American visitor’s description
of the “fearfully mongrel aspect” of the Brazilian population, looking like
“caricatures of men, . . . the sort of thing to which miscegenation led.” But
later, in retrospect, he realized that they were just “sickly,” which is not
a very pleasant image either.13 He writes as if the guilt associated with
that perception had fi xed it in his memory, and only the teaching of Boas
and the courage of Roquette-Pinto in standing up to the Arianists at a
congress in Rio in 1929 had brought him to realize the difference between
race and culture.
Indeed, the incident so preoccupied him that, in accordance with his
shameless habit of rewriting his publications in the light of changing dis-
positions and fashions, the “bando de marinheiros nacionais” disembark-
ing from a ship “pela neve mole de Brooklyn” in Casa-grande became, in
the English translation of 1946, “a group of Brazilian seamen . . . crossing
Brooklyn Bridge”: a painterly evocation of dark-skinned men set against
the soft white snow is swapped for a harsh monument to modernity. But
Pallares-Burke (273) believes that the true occasion was the inauguration
of a statue to Simón Bolívar in Central Park, where a group of mulattoes
and cafuzos (individuals of mixed Amerindian and African descent) sat
incongruously amidst the assembled dignitaries! It is impossible to tell
whether the changes in the story were just a whim or refl ect a more con-
sidered intent.
Freyre’s opposition to ideas of racial superiority, or to notions about
the degenerative effects of race mixture, coexisted with his attachment to
“keeping in keeping,” the desirability for a society of remaining in tune
with its heritage. Thus, he would express reservations about the aloof-
ness of German immigrants vis-à-vis Brazil’s tradition of mixture, and
indeed his attraction to Southern supremacists in the United States was
due to a perception of them as upholders of tradition. This nostalgic incli-
nation is related to two sides of Freyre’s Victorianism evoked by the title
of Pallares-Burke’s book: on the one hand William Morris’s advocacy of a
society changed by a reevaluation and reconstruction of its past, and on
the other hand a decadent style of Victorianism—Walter Pater, the Pre-
Raphaelites—that could be described as an offshoot of l’art pour l’art sen-
sibility, premodernist and self-indulgent, and glorifying of the subjective
response as the core of art appreciation. The two point in different direc-
tions, as does Benzaquen de Araújo, who sees in Freyre’s “chatty style” (“o
tom de conversa, de bate-papo”) a device enabling him to take the opposed
positions we have mentioned or, stated more politely perhaps, giving an
“antinomic character” to his arguments.14 Yet Freyre also fell, slightly ear-
lier but enduringly, under the spell of the very different Lafcadio Hearn,
13. Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, xvi–xvii.
14. Benzaquen de Araújo, Guerra e Paz, 208.
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216 Latin American Research Review
a travel writer and social commentator of remarkable talent, who stood up
to the preconceptions and prejudices of his time, wrote enthusiastically
and feelingly, but without sentimentalism, about blacks and mulattoes in
the United States and in the French Caribbean, took sides against injus-
tice, and eventually lived for many years as a professor in Japan. Hearn
shared absolutely nothing with Pater.
Casa-grande turned out to be the fi rst of what is known as Freyre’s tril-
ogy, including Sobrados e mucambos (1936) and Ordem e progresso (1959),
books frequently passed over, which further reassessments will have to
consider in detail. To judge by the fertility of recent research, this reassess-
ment is bound to bring surprises. Indeed, Pallares-Burke’s husband, Peter
Burke, is the only contributor to Lund and McNee’s volume who ranges
across Freyre’s entire life work—most of the others having stopped at
Casa-grande, save Schwarz who focuses on Novo Mundo nos trópicos. Com-
ing from a long and deep involvement in European cultural history, and
unique among historians for the range of his interests and contributions—
from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, to the iconography of
Louis XIV and far beyond—Burke found the multifaceted aspect of Frey-
re’s historical sociology rewarding and creative. It is no accident that he
is the most unqualifi ed admirer in this volume, because it is social scien-
tists who fi nd Freyre so slippery. Burke, who was a pioneer in convincing
English-language historians of the merits of Annales-style total history,
admires Freyre’s unrestrained inquisitiveness about any aspect of life:
cuisine, dress, language, symbolism, religion, even gait. He compares him
to the great pioneers of European cultural history, Huizinga and Burck-
hardt, and notes how he foreshadows later fi gures such as Braudel and
Philippe Ariès, the historian of the family. Interestingly, the leading Brit-
ish social historian Asa Briggs warmly acknowledges Freyre’s infl uence in
leading him to pay attention to the details of domestic life, such as jewelry
and furniture.15
But Freyre’s randomness and lack of discipline, the propensity to in-
dulge in those “antinomies” rather than resolving them, infuriates Brazil-
ianists like Skidmore and David Maybury-Lewis.16 Certainly one glaring
omission from his theory is a sustained consideration of religion: in Casa-
grande it is simply absent; ignored are the Muslim heritage of the slaves
from West Africa, the Yoruba cults, and all those traditions that, despite
the “Afro” label, were “deafricanized” over the centuries, as Schwarz says
(315). Yet these cults provide a vast fi eld for the exploration of cultural
15. Asa Briggs, “Gilberto Freyre and the Study of Social History,” in The Collected Essays
of Asa Briggs, vol. 1 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).
16. Thomas Skidmore, “Raízes de Gilberto Freyre,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34
(2002): 1–20; David Maybury-Lewis, introduction, The Masters and the Slaves, reproduced in
Casa-grande e senzala, critical edition, 1111–1116.
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REVIEW ESSAYS 217
hybridity, cultural mestiçagem, transculturation, and allied concepts aris-
ing from Freyre’s concerns. The self-evident and self-conscious borrowing
of Catholic symbols by the cults, the occasional introduction of “Afro”
practices and personages into churches, the evident “dual use,” especially
among Evangelicals, of practices like exorcism, and the corresponding be-
lief in the reality of possession by an evil spirit—all this and doubtless
much more would be powerful grist to the Luso-tropical mill. Instead we
fi nd only two chapters in Ordem e progresso that focus almost entirely on
the institutional church. The reason for this apparent facultative blind-
ness may well be that, as a principally urban phenomenon, the cults stand
apart from the agenda of Casa-grande. But the omission may also refl ect
Freyre’s insensitivity to the self-awareness of race and racial origins as-
sociated with the cults.
Modern Brazilian anthropologists—such as Fry in his famous essay
“Feijoada e soul-food,” Beatriz Gois Dantas in describing the elaborate self-
projections of mães de santo in the urban settings of Sergipe and Bahia,
or Patricia Birman in her writings on the interface of possession cults
and Pentecostalism—go to great lengths to explore the refl exiveness of
African identity and of Africa-derived religious involvement in Brazil.17
For Freyre, in contrast, racial mixture is an unconscious affair, a matter
of instinct, especially among slaves and their descendants, who are given
no protagonic role at all: strategies and purposes are the preserve of the
senhores de engenho, the slave owners, bishops, and so on. No wonder can-
domblé barely caught his notice.
Freyre avoided any intellectual arena save that which he could con-
trol, namely his own state-funded Instituto Joaquim Nabuco in Recife, the
pages of the Diario de Pernambuco, where he was able to publish anything
he wished, and the endless prefaces in which he systematically denigrated
any who criticized him. He was a highly political animal, but not one who
would align himself with a particular ideology or party—at least not in
public, keeping on good terms with governments of all stripes. For long
more admired abroad than at home, he had few students (though many
underlings), did not inspire a school of thought, and for decades was at-
tacked or at best ignored by Brazilian academics, especially the postwar
generations of historians and social scientists of the University of São
Paulo. They knew little of the Northeast, which inspired Freyre’s macro-
model of Brazilian social relations, and through to the 1980s, they tended
to espouse an economics-based approach to history; for many of them
Freyre was no more than the pompous defender of an unjust and discrim-
inatory social order. It is perhaps not by chance that the more appreciative
17. Beatriz Gois Dantas, Vovó Nagô e Papai Branco: usos e abusos da Africa no Brasil (Rio de
Janeiro: Graal, 1988); Patricia Birman, “Cultos de possessão e pentecostalismo no Brasil:
Passagens,” Religião e Sociedade 17 (1996): 90–108.
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218 Latin American Research Review
Southern assessments have come from Rio—namely from Benzaquen de
Araújo and the compilers of the critical edition gathered around Giucci.
For his part, Freyre had already from the 1930s regarded São Paulo as en-
emy territory. But he was just a little too lazy as a thinker, aloof from the
tussle of intellectual argument.
The books here reviewed could hardly have come into the world un-
der more contrasting circumstances. The critical edition is a triumphant
start to what could be a wonderful new international series of modern
Latin-American classics, so long as the sponsoring governments stay the
course. Lund and McNee’s collection arrives in an eccentric presentation
which will not help to get its authors’ often valuable contributions into
the public eye. It is written mostly in Portuguese, but with three out of
sixteen chapters in Spanish, and published in-house by the Instituto In-
ternacional de Literatura Iberoamericana at the University of Pittsburgh.
Pallares-Burke’s book, in contrast, comes crowned in glory, having won
the Premio da Academia Brasileira de Letras and the Premio Jabuti. If
Freyre is emerging in a clearer light, it is thanks to Pallares-Burke’s mag-
isterial biography of his early years. It is far from a hagiography, but on
the contrary remarkably judicious, and avoids the temptation of polemics,
which its subject invites. We can only hope that she continues with further
volumes on Freyre’s later life.
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