Race, Periphery, Reification: Speculations on “Hybridity” in Light of Gilberto Freyre’s Casa-Grande & Senzala

Gilberto Freyre’s Casa-grande & senzala(1933) is,¹in keeping with a long-standing intellectual-historical consensus, the founding treatise of modern Brazilian ethnography. Credited with formulating a sociocultural genealogy that was later to popularize itself in the widely disseminated slogan of a Brazilian “racial democracy,”²it remains, apart from the openly racist tracts of the earlier, positivist sociology and ethnography that Freyre effectively discredited for good, what is also that discipline’s most controversial and politically suspect work. But reading Casa-grande forearmed with suspicions of its underlying ideology of “race” results not only in an intellectual-historical but in a no less literary-critical predicament: how to square what are without doubt the still vividly contemporary and writerly resonances of the book, especially on the level of narrative and style, with its blatant mythologies as a work of sociology and historical interpretation? How, that is, to explain the considerable literary and, at times, the genuinely critical poignancy of Casa-grande for the sensibilities of a reader politically alerted to the dangers in even the most abstract theoretical attribution of a socially explanatory value to racial categories? This remains no less the case when, ironically, such theories are brought to bear against doctrines of racial purity—although here racialization is exchanged for the analogous stigma of, as modern parlance puts it, “essentialism.”

In a foreword written for a special, forty-seventh revised edition (2003) of the book,³no less a personage than Brazilian ex-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso poses more or less the same question. (And who more appropriate to take up the controversy over Casa-grande, given the analogous intellectual-historical predicament represented by the trajectory of “FHC” himself, from Brazil’s preeminent Marxist economist and oppositional intellectual to the apostle-cum-architect-in-chief of Brazil’s own erstwhile conversion to neoliberalism?) Cardoso is quick to concede the many “vulnerable aspects” of Casa-grande:“its confusing of race with culture, its methodological eclecticism, the myth, if not quite the hoax of racial democracy, the absence of class conflicts,” and so forth. But, he continues,

if Freyre’s work survives, [and if] its interpretive truth-claims not only continuously reproduce themselves . . . but continue to be troubling to so many of us, all the more necessary to explore the deeper reasons for resisting so insistently any move to grant it a real acceptance and to praise it for its positive aspects.

(Freyre 2003, 25; my translation)

One such “positive” aspect Cardoso has already surmised to be something in the nature of a poetic truth at the core of Casa-grande, purportedly discernable beneath the book’s more blatantly ideological trappings:

If the oversimplification and the supposed equilibrium of its contrary poles fail to explain logically the movement of society, they do serve to cast into relief certain fundamental characteristics. They are, from this standpoint, heuristic instruments, spiritual constructs whose basis in reality counts for less than the sheer imaginary and creative energy they contain, enabling us to grasp the essential within the truth-claims it advances on the interpretive level.

(25; my translation)

This may be a reasonable approach to solving the conundrum of what is itself, so to speak, a literary/theoretical hybridity in Casa-grande, a subtlety of discursive structure that allows Freyre’s masterpiece to step slyly to one side of its anticipated theoretical “vulnerabilities” and into a more novelistic, even “Proustian” register.⁴The latter quietly but unerringly substitutes for the objective, metascientific legitimation of its arguments a subjective (but collective) experience of recollection: we Brazilians, regardless of class and race, sense in virtually all aspects of our culture and private lives (e.g., the purportedly African-plebeian colloquialism of spoken Brazilian Portuguese [see Freyre 2003, 414–18; 1986, 343–49]) the presence of a kind of primal scene or narrative image—the “co-fraternization” of three (African, indigenous American, and European), or at least (given, in Freyre’s view, the effective nullification of the indigenous third) of two races.

The popular-cultural potency of this interpellation needs...