The Politics of the Essay Lusotropicalism as Ideology and Theory
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The Politics of the Essay Lusotropicalism as Ideology and Theory Filipe Carreira da Silva 1,2
& Manuel
Villaverde Cabral 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In this article we discuss the politics of the essay of three major twentieth-century Portuguese-speaking intellectuals: Gilberto Freyre, Jorge Dias and António Sérgio. Our topic of discussion is Lusotropicalism. Through an examination of the essayist production of these thinkers (1920s–1960s), we revisit this social theoretical account of racial miscegenation, social assimilation and cultural hybridity originally developed by Freyre by reference to Brazil and later extended to the case of the Portuguese colonial empire. In particular, the article shows how the essay performs a crucial role in the origins, process of development and the implications of this social theory. By eliciting a reflective interplay between form and content, the essay trumps both the journal article and the monograph in providing these three key intellectuals with the outlet with which to think through a social theory that briefly doubled as an ideology of state. Keywords Lusotropicalism . Essayism . Gilberto Freyre . Jorge Dias . António Sérgio .
Postcoloniality . Hybridity . Miscegenation
Introduction In this article, we discuss the “essay form” as an important tradition in the history of the social and human sciences in Portugal (Silva 2015). The essay form is here both our object of study, namely as it appears in the writings of Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), Jorge Dias (1907–1973) and António Sérgio (1883–1969), and, to use Adorno’s formulation, a “speculative investigation of specific, culturally pre-determined objects.” (Adorno 1984,
* Filipe Carreira da Silva [email protected] Manuel Villaverde Cabral [email protected]
1
Selwyn College, Cambridge, Cambridge, England
2
Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
The American Sociologist
p. 151) Our “speculative investigation” is about Lusotropicalism. This refers to a conception of the “Portuguese world” (Portugal, Brazil and its former African colonies) as a distinct civilization (Eisenstadt 2002), with a shared cultural and social order where the biological process of racial miscegenation goes hand in hand with the processes of social assimilation and cultural hybridity (Freyre 1986, p. 16). In particular, we discuss this discursive formation as found in the essays of Freyre, Dias and Sérgio, whose rich and nuanced intertextuality reflects a problematic about empire, colonialism, and race relations – as well as about the role of science and literature in their development. We explore some of the ways in which the essays by Freyre, Dias and Sérgio speak to each other around three key themes and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. These themes include the centuries-long “decadence of the peninsular (i.e. Iberian) peoples,” national identity (national, but also colonial and post-colonial), and the conditions of possi
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