Volume 8, Number 1 · January 26, 1967
The Mestizo Republic
By Raymond Carr
Brazil and Africa
by José Honório Rodrigues, translated by Richard A. Mazzava, translated by Sam Hileman
University of California, 382 pp., $7.50
Plantation Boy
by José Honório Rodrigues, translated by Emmi Baum
Knopf, 530 pp., $6.95
A History of Modern Brazil
by José Maria Bello, translated by James L. Taylor, with a concluding chapter by Rollie E. Poppino
Stanford, 362 pp., $10.00
New Perspectives of Brazil
edited by Eric N. Baklanoff
Vanderbilt University, 328 pp., $7.50
The publication of Gilberto Freyre's masterpiece, Casa Grande e Senzala, in 1934, marked an epoch, not merely in the study of Brazilian history and sociology, but in a process which is sometimes pompously called Brazil's quest for identity. In young ex-colonial nations scholars search the past to find the image of a national community distinct from that of the motherland. Before Freyre, most investigators had been depressed by the racial mixture of Brazil in a world dominated by theories of white superiority; slavery and miscegenation constituted the core of Brazilian social history. It was Freyre who turned racial mixture and a supporting racial tolerance into a national asset in his long study of the slave society of the great sugar plantations of the North East. His thesis was that the racial tolerance of the Portuguese colonizers combined with the shortage of white women in a slave society where Negresses were abundant, highly sexed, and incapable of serious resistance, to produce a racially tolerant mestizo nation. Half breeds were not the shame of Brazil but a peculiar and glorious contribution to civilization. He had found a national raison d'être.
Review, 2697 words
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