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Luso-tropicalism and Its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8647274

1527-1900

Micol Seigel,

History of Medicine and Tropical Health

Based on a 2016 gathering in Rio de Janeiro, this edited volume focuses on the concept of lusotropicalism, the idea of Portugal's tolerance for racial mixture that supposedly made its colonies places of exceptional biological innovation and social harmony. The essays explore lusotropicalism's geopolitical and intellectual contexts, placing both the philosophy and its best-known champion, Gilberto Freyre, in broad interrelations: to academics from Brazil, Portugal, the United States, France, Mozambique, Timor, Angola, and multinational bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); to academic fields of eugenics, genetics, medicine, anthropology, biotypology, and sociology; and to political regimes from fascist and segregationist to liberal and multicultural in the contemporary sense. The volume thus documents the life and times of a long-lived, politically highly useful idea.With this intellectual history, the editors seek to fortify the long-standing project of debunking lusotropicalism. Perhaps the most effective way they do this is by showing the idea conceptualized differently in different fields of study across place and time. If lusotropicalism meant Black-white mixing and social harmony in Brazil, it meant quite different things in other parts of the Portuguese empire. For the Portuguese anthropologist António Mendes Correia, for example, it meant powerful cross-racial sentiment linking metropolitan Portuguese and colonial Timorese subjects in hierarchical affective relations. As Ricardo Roque's compelling essay explains, Mendes Correia and other Portuguese colonial anthropologists rejected the embrace of miscegenation as the source of harmony as lusotropicalism came under increasing critique in the postwar world, even as they sustained that philosophy's Portuguese exceptionalism, conservativism to the point of comfort with fascism, and proimperial nationalism.Roque's focus on political utility is shared by many of the volume's authors, advancing the challenge to lusotropicalism by showing that the idea's strong purchase owed less to its inexorable logic than to its instrumental applications. Cláudia Castelo makes this case in her chapter reviewing the circulation of Freyre's ideas, particularly his view of miscegenation, in Lusophone imperial worlds. Portuguese thinkers mostly ignored Freyre until after World War II, she points out, when they embraced lusotropicalism as a defense of Portugal's empire.One gem in this collection is another argument about why lusotropicalism circulated so widely: because Freyre poured his considerable resources into its acceleration as a vehicle for his own fame. This is the case made in Jerry Dávila's virtuosic contextualization of Freyre, which includes such valuable details as the racially inequitable literacy rates in Brazil and the resulting lack of Black intellectual interlocutors or the contacts Freyre made in the United States, which were actually not with anthropologists but with historians who fed his romanticization of Brazilian slavery. Highlighting Freyre's embarrassingly bald self-promotion, Dávila reminds readers of some of Freyre's automythologization: Franz Boas was never Freyre's mentor, as Freyre later claimed, and he earned a master's, not a doctoral, degree. In what Peter Wade, in his excellent afterword placing race mixture in Americas-wide context, calls “merciless detail,” Dávila recaps Freyre's refusals to collaborate with emerging cohorts of Afro-Brazilian scholars and their righteous denunciations of him as “a joke,” not a scholar but a “literary figure,” and a “creator of mirages” (pp. 48, 300). Freyre's self-promotion included claiming ideas that were not his, as Dávila demonstrates by showing that they circulated before he wrote. Freyre gave them wings and with them the right-wing racial populism, white supremacist nationalism, and antiblackness that he imbued in his work.Given the depressing reminder of lusotropicalism's implications, some of the most satisfying essays in this collection are those that trace intellectual conversations outside Portuguese imperial circuits and national borders. The Mozambican intellectual Kamba Simango, Lorenzo Macagno contends, was less engaged with Lusophone peers than with the Anglophone African diaspora. Portuguese anthropologists working in Angola did not find the Brazilian case a useful point of contact, finds Samuël Coghe in his fine chapter about debates over the racial particularity and difference of the “Bushmen.” For the various people classified as Bushmen and contrasting ethnic groups, the generative site of anthropological knowledge was southern Africa in conversation with Europe. The changes in views of Bushmen therefore coordinated with the transnational, if uneven and staggered, shift to the population biology understanding of the process of adaptation.As tends to be the case with collected volumes, the essays are uneven. Some rehearse work published some time ago without integrating the insights of the volume's more critical thinkers. One of these is an essay that preserves some of Freyre's self-portrait as a champion for Afro-Brazilian rights in direct contradiction to the convincing account offered by Dávila (p. 116). Another reads as if the author were debunking lusotropicalism for the first time, despite an explicit nod to the reiteration of this task in the essay's title, “Luso-tropicalism Debunked, Again.” Perhaps this is inevitable in a project formulated as a challenge to a theory that has already been challenged so thoroughly and in such wide arenas. Perhaps it has to do with the strict focus on lusotropicalism rather than its constitutive exceptionalisms, nationalisms, and racial thinking, which have been exhaustively rejected in fields as remote as the history of slavery and empire, Afro-Brazilian and other African diaspora studies, cultural anthropology, postcolonial theory, border studies, and critical theory on race across the disciplines. Yet the project, alas, is still necessary. Despite scholarly consensus regarding the fallacy of lusotropicalism, the idea continues to circulate in both classic and neological forms. This volume makes another valiant attempt to reroute the conversation.