Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics

Gilberto Freyre was arguably the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Latin America. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalist, a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, a novelist, poet and artist. He was a cultural critic, with a good deal to say about architecture, past and present, and a public intellectual, whose pronouncements on race, region and empire - not to mention sex - made him famous in some quarters and notorious in others. The Masters and the Slaves, his most famous work, went through forty editions and has been translated into nine languages, made into a comic book and a television mini-series, while two directors (one of them Robert Rossellini) planned to turn it into a film. Yet he is not well known outside Brazil. Freyre was a major social thinker, one of the few who have not come from Western Europe or the USA, and this book argues that we should take account of the pioneering work of this gifted intellectual. His ideas are of particular relevance today for both political and academic reasons. His interest in gender, ethnicity, hybridity, identity, globalization, and capitalism ensures that his ideas are still provocative and topical, and ready to be introduced to a wider audience. `The world's great thinking happens in many climes, contexts, and languages. To alert the English-speaking world to this fact, there are no better scholars than Peter and Maria Lucia Pallares-Burke and no better subject than Gilberto Freyre - Brazil's uomo universale, who combined literary genius, intellectual audacity, academic rigor, unrestricted vision and profound originality in work that has helped shape one of the global giants of the present and future: modern Brazil.' Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Tufts University `As expected, the authors have produced a major work of intellectual biography of a most original and influential Latin-American thinker.' Jose Murilo de Carvalho, Brazilian Academy of Letters `This is an excellent book focusing on the work of the leading Brazilian intellectual of the twentieth century, whose ideas had a major national and international impact.' Francisco Bethencourt, University of London `Peter Burke is the leading culture historian of our generations.'Jay Winter, Yale University The past is always with us. It helped to shape our present; it is helping to mould our future. Now, as never before, it is crucial that historians communicate their knowledge to society at large. It is crucial for them: they need to engage with the needs of society. But it is also crucial for society, since historians form a bulwark against the abuse of the past by the powerful. Historians show what it was to be human in another place at another time; explain the complex and interconnected ways in which societies all over the world have come to share in our global present; and can encourage readers to be sceptical both of all attempts to hijack history for political purposes and of all processes which seek to dehumanise others. This series embraces the wealth of subjects open to the historian, ranging from people and places to music and science. It does so with the support of the insights of a range of disciplines from anthropology to psychology, and with an emphasis both on good writing and on accessibility to the general reader.