Histories without frontiers. The Brazil that Gilberto Freyre created

Abstract

Gilberto Freyre was an organizer and divulger of ideas and was responsible for the invention of a series of Brazilianisms. Though his work is extensive and multifaceted, Gilberto Freyre is mainly remembered for his book Casa Grande & Senzala, which is still regarded as innovative in terms of its subject, methodology and style and remains a bibliographical reference to understand the history of Brazil. The book Casa Grande & Senzala covers a series of aspects which would become indispensable to describe and imagine Brazil, in addition to being an original study about the general traits of the Portuguese colonization,reflected in the notion that the Portuguese had made a benign colonization in the tropics because of their “psycho-physiological predisposition” to miscegenation and the encounter of cultures. In this article, I will examine how Gilberto Freyre established an equivalence between Portuguese history and heritage and Brazilian ways of living. My pur- pose is to verify how the category of cultural frontier was initially mobilized to imagine the emergence of Brazil – through the transformation of excluding practices into hypotheses of accommodation – and, at a later stage, reutilized to describe the singularity of other cultural areas.