John Thomas Maddox
Universidad de Georgia
 
 

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond offers a unique overview of racial democracy, Brazilian style. She finds that many white authors of the foundational texts that form the basis of Brazilian racial democracy actually constitute an arrogation of black culture. She contextualizes and analyzes this myth of race by examining the writings of Gilberto Freyre and other canonical Brazilian authors. Isfahani-Hammond focuses on Casa Grande e Senzala (1933), and re-evaluates Pallares-Burke’s 2005 study of Freyre’s formative years. Her analysis reveals that, contrary to popular belief, Casa Grande is a continuation of–not a complete rupture from–eugenic notions of race that can be traced back to the early twentieth century.

Freyre believed that Brazilian slave-owners of European descent were those most qualified to define Brazil’s unique Afro-Brazilian culture. He reasoned that these slave-owning masters best understood both the richness of this black culture and the plight of the slave. Heavily influenced by American Southern culture while studying at a Baylor College in Texas, Freyre actually wrote in favor of the Klu Klux Klan. He further believed that anyone, partially or exclusively, of African descent should not be educated or permitted the same rights and authority of the masters at the top of Northeastern Brazil’s social strata during the nineteenth century.

Instead, what Freyre did produce was a romantic model idealizing the Lusophone tropics as an idyllic place where the white European came in touch with black Africa through food, music, language, and sex. This interface, according to Freyre, offered the white master enrichment without weakening him. Although other eugenicists of the time saw this as the white Brazilian losing status with other Europeans, Freyre did not agree. Nor, he said, did the white Brazilian master lose his superiority to other races. In Isfahani-Hammond’s reading of Freyre, miscegenation was merely a means of branqueamento or “whitening” of slaves, former slaves, and their descendents—surely a benefit to improve the genetic line. Freyre’s romantic image of an eroticized ingenio (sugar plantation) was one he believed should be the model for all of Brazil. He ignored the stark horrors of forced labor and rape in his writings, focusing instead on the benefits of a harmonious familial structure and, not surprisingly, torrid interracial seduction.

This vision of benevolent subjugation on the farm heavily influences Freyre’s praise of Jorge de Lima’s poetry and José de Alencar’s prose. Isfahani-Hammond also devotes an insightful chapter to Joaquim Nabuco’s odd abolitionist yet white supremacist writings. Freyre and Nabuco’s depictions of the rural Nordeste even inspired some of Caetano Veloso’s famous lyrics. Whether or not Veloso intended it, Isfahani-Hammond shows that Veloso is part of a long and problematic tradition in Brazilian literature in which the white voice arrogates black culture and calls it “racial democracy”. Since the latter is such a powerful myth in Brazil, it has been challenged only very recently. Many say that current identity politics in Brazil follow the U.S. model of “black pride” and the unveiling of racial inequalities is but another form of cultural imperialism that Latin America can do without. Perhaps partially for this reason, Isfahani-Hammond compares works by Freyre, Nabuco, and Lima to writers from Europe, Cuba (Nicolás Guillén, Alejo Carpentier), and Puerto Rico (Luis Palés Matos), as well as canonical African American writers such as Frederick Douglas and Langston Hughes. Isfahani-Hammond’s analysis of race boldly goes against the grain in its criticism of an almost sacred figure like Freyre. Furthermore, she takes as her point of departure the viewpoint of white authors who write about race and places this work within the bourgeoning domain of “White Studies”, along with studies in gender, race, literature, culture, and history. Anyone writing or teaching on any of these areas, especially those focusing on Gilberto Freyre, would do well to incorporate Isfahani-Hammond’s insights.