The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries (review)

Casa-Grande e Senzala, the seminal text by Gilberto Freyre, continues to be cited as an achievement in a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and cultural studies, both in Latin America as well as in the United States. Published in 1933, the text served as a response to the notions of racial degeneracy that had dominated American thought since the nineteenth century. In his study, Freyre set out to detail the varied components of Brazilian society, revealing the contributions made by indigenous inhabitants of the land, Portuguese settlers, and their African slaves in the colonial period. As Thomas Skidmore writes, with the publication of this tome, “readers were being given the first scholarly examination of Brazilian national character with an unabashedly optimistic message: Brazilians could be proud of their unique, ethnically mixed tropical civilization [ . . . ].”¹ Skidmore later concedes that Freyre’s analysis “served to reinforce the whitening ideal by showing graphically that the (primarily white) elite had gained valuable cultural traits from their intimate contact with the African (and Indian, to a lesser extent).”² That is, Freyre’s construction of hybridity does not include genuine reciprocity in its accounts of the (often-violent) interactions between the indigenous, African slaves, and European immigrants. Rather, in Freyre’s work, the conquered served to improve, enhance, and develop the existence of the conquerors. It is from this critical perspective that this collection of ten essays (four about Brazil, two about Haiti, one on Algeria and Martinique, and one on the Americas in general) begins. In her compelling introduction, editor Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond clearly states that the compilation examines the “complex, often contradictory ways that slavery informs theorizations of national community in the region that has alternately been called the Black Atlantic, Greater Caribbean, or Postplantation Americas” (3). She makes the point that while the academy now celebrates mestizaje, transculturation, hybridization, and créolité, it does so without awareness, much less acknowledgment, of the intricacies of race. Indeed, in her brief yet incisive commentary on three recent reassessments of representations of slavery in literature, Isfahani-Hammond ably demonstrates that American discourses on race continue to be positioned as derivative to those produced by the United States.

In the first essay, “The Sugar Daddy: Gilberto Freyre and the White Man’s Love for Blacks,” César Braga-Pinto offers a sophisticated analysis regarding how Freyre employs the motif of homosexuality in several of his works, including Casa-Grande e Senzala. Braga-Pinto writes: “In his attempt to represent a fraternal, multiracial society, [Freyre] ultimately conflates a number of anxieties and taboos, in particular those concerning racial contact, homosexuality, and incest” (24). He highlights Freyre’s distinction between supposedly “good” and “bad” miscegenation, the former the result of contributions to European civilization made by African and indigenous populations in Brazil, the latter being the transmission of syphilis to Europeans from native peoples. Braga-Pinto also calls attention to Freyre’s sustained focus on the genitalia of Portuguese male slave masters and their African male slaves—women have no place in his depiction of the construction of the Brazilian nation—as well as how Freyre feminizes black males while promoting the hyper-virility of Portuguese men. He skillfully reveals how Freyre’s text ultimately legitimates a racially and economically homogenous elite that silences divergent voices in the formation of a national subjectivity.

In her essay, “Writing Brazilian Culture,” Isfahani-Hammond examines two of Freyre’s most famous essays, “Como e Porque Escrevi Casa-Grande e Senzala” and “Reinterpretando José de Alencar,” both written in the 1960s when he was already well-established as a renowned intellectual in Brazil. She persuasively argues that Freyre’s mestiço is, in fact, a figure that Freyre creates as he is describing him. Casa-Grande e Senzala therefore functions as a speech-act, forming a rhetorical character that did not exist prior to its writing. She reveals how Freyre uses himself as the foundation...