Gilberto de Mello Freyre KBE (March 15, 1900 – July 18, 1987) was a Brazilian sociologist, anthropologist, historian, writer, painter, journalist, congressman born in Recife, Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil. He is commonly associated with other major Brazilian cultural interpreters of the first half of the 20th century, such as Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Caio Prado Júnior. His best-known work is a sociological treatise named Casa-Grande & Senzala (literally, "The main house and the slave quarters," as on a traditional plantation, although the book title is usually translated as The Masters and the Slaves).
![]() | This article uses bare URLs, which are uninformative and vulnerable to link rot. (September 2022) |
![]() | This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (June 2010) |
Gilberto Freyre KBE | |
---|---|
![]() Gilberto Freyre c. 1956 | |
Born | Gilberto de Mello Freyre (1900-03-15)March 15, 1900 Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil |
Died | July 18, 1987(1987-07-18) (aged 87) Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil |
Alma mater | Baylor University Columbia University |
Known for | Casa-Grande & Senzala, concept of racial democracy |
Awards | Prêmio Machado de Assis, Prêmio Jabuti |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Sociology, Historian, Anthropology, Writer |
Signature | |
![]() |
Freyre had an internationalist academic career, having studied at Baylor University, Texas from the age of eighteen and then at Columbia University, where he got his master's degree under the tutelage of William Shepperd.[1] At Columbia, Freyre was a student of the anthropologist Franz Boas.[2] After coming back to Recife in 1923, Freyre spearheaded a handful of writers in a Brazilian regionalist movement. After working extensively as a journalist, he was made head of cabinet of the Governor of the State of Pernambuco, Estácio Coimbra. With the 1930 revolution and the rise of Getúlio Vargas, both Coimbra and Freyre went into exile. Freyre went first to Portugal and then to the US, where he worked as Visiting Professor at Stanford.[3] By 1932, Freyre had returned to Brazil. In 1933, Freyre's best-known work, The Masters and the Slaves was published and was well received.[citation needed] In 1946, Freyre was elected to the federal Congress.[4] At various times, Freyre also served as director of the newspapers A Província and Diário de Pernambuco.[5]
In 1962, Freyre was awarded the Prêmio Machado de Assis by the Brazilian Academy of Letters, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of Brazilian literature.[6] Over the course of his long career, Freyre received numerous other awards, honorary degrees, and other honors both in Brazil and internationally. Examples include admission to L'ordre des Arts et Lettres (France), investiture as Grand Officier de La Légion d'Honneur (France), investiture as Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (Great Britain), the Gran-Cruz of the Ordem do Infante Dom Henrique (Portugal), and honorary doctorates at Columbia University and the Sorbonne.[7]
Freyre's most widely known work is The Masters and the Slaves (1933). At the time, this was a revolutionary work for the study of races and cultures in Brazil. As Lucia Lippi Oliveira notes, "In the 1930s and 1940s, Freyre was praised as being the creator of a new, positive self-image of Brazil, one that overcame the racism present in authors like Sílvio Romero, Euclides da Cunha, and Oliveira Viana."[8] The book is a turning point in the analysis of the black heritage in Brazil, which is highly extolled by Freyre. His effort both to rehabilitate the black culture and identify Brazil as a conciliatory country is comparable to the ones of other Latin American writers, such as Fernando Ortiz in Cuba (Contrapunteo Cubano de Tobacco y Azúcar, 1940), and José Vasconcelos in Mexico (La Raza Cosmica, 1926).[9][10] Since its publication and initial reception, this work has also been criticized for how its "focus on a single identity in modern Brazil resulted not only in factual inaccuracies and distortions of reality but also in a larger societal refusal to acknowledge racism in modern Brazil,"[11] for example.
The Masters and the Slaves is the first of a series of three books, which also included The Mansions and the Shanties: The Making of Modern Brazil (1938) and Order and Progress: Brazil from Monarchy to Republic (1957). The trilogy is generally considered a classic of modern cultural anthropology and social history. Other very important contributions of Freyre's were The Northeast (1937) and The English in Brazil (1948).
The actions of Freyre as a public intellectual are rather controversial. Labeled as a communist in the 1930s, he later moved to the political Right. He supported Portugal's Salazar government in the 1950s, and after 1964, defended the military dictatorship of Brazil's Humberto Castelo Branco. Freyre is considered to be the "father" of lusotropicalism: the theory whereby miscegenation had been a positive force in Brazil. "Miscegenation" at that time tended to be viewed in a negative way, as in the theories of Eugen Fischer and Charles Davenport.[12]
Freyre was acclaimed for his literary style.[citation needed] Of his poem "Bahia of all saints and of almost all sins," Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira wrote: "Your poem, Gilberto, will be an eternal source of jealousy to me"(cf. Manuel Bandeira, Poesia e Prosa. Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1958, v. II: Prose, p. 1398).[13] Freyre wrote this long poem inspired by his first visit to Salvador.[citation needed]
Freyre died on July 18, 1987 in Recife.
“Every Brazilian, even the light skinned fair haired one carries about him on his soul, when not on soul and body alike, the shadow or at least the birthmark of the aborigine or the negro, in our affections, our excessive mimicry, our Catholicism which so delights the senses, our music, our gait, our speech, our cradle songs, in everything that is a sincere expression of our lives, we almost all of us bear the mark of that influence.” -The Main House and the Slave Quarters
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: url-status (link)General | |
---|---|
National libraries | |
Biographical dictionaries | |
Other |