Robert J.C. Young – Oxford University
In May 2000, Survival, a worldwide organisation supporting the rights of tribal peoples, marked the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the first Europeans in Brazil by launching a campaign for land ownership for Brazilian Indians. Entitled ‘Brazil: 500 years of resistance’, Survival’s publicity leaflets highlighted a tristes tropiques history of exploitation and genocide:
When the Portuguese set foot in Brazil, there were five million indigenous peoples. As the invaders introduced disease, slavery and violence, indigenous peoples were virtually wiped out. Today they number 330,000.
Indigenous peoples in Brazil still face eviction from their land, violence, and disease at the hands of loggers, settlers, gold miners and powerful politicians and business.
The contemporary gold rush in the Amazon has repeated the conditions of the rubber boom that occurred there at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1910, Sir Roger Casement, a former member of the British Consular Service, was asked by the British government to investigate allegations of atrocities committed against the Putumayo Indians by the Peruvian Amazon Company, a British company engaged in the extraction of rubber on the Brazil-Peru border. Casement was an Irishman who, with F.D. Morel, had earlier been instrumental in exposing the atrocities carried out in the so-called Congo Free State about which Conrad had written in Heart of Darkness (1899). Michael Taussig has argued convincingly that Casement can be directly linked to Kurtz in that novel (Taussig 1986). While in Africa, Casement too became sceptical towards the idea of the civilising claims of imperialism, a scepticism that was only increased by what he found in the Amazon basin.
Treatment of the tribal people
These are not only murdered, flogged, chained up like wild beasts, hunted far and wide and their dwellings burnt, their wives raped, their children dragged away to slavery and outrage, but are shamelessly swindled into the bargain. These are strong words, but not adequately strong. The condition of things is the most disgraceful, the most lawless, the most inhuman, I believe that exists in the world to-day. It far exceeds in depravity and demoralisation the Congo regime at its worst.... The slavery under which they suffer is an abominable, an atrocious one.... It is appalling to think of all the suffering so-called Spanish and Portuguese civilisation has wantonly inflicted on these people.
(Casement 1997:294-5)
On his return, he submitted a report verifying the atrocities to the British government. In a fine historical irony, Casement, the urbane colonised subject, found himself at the centre of a campaign for the human rights of ‘free’ post-colonial indigenous Brazilians. That historical irony was to be reinforced six years later when the same British government which had knighted him and persuaded him to go to Brazil on its behalf, executed Casement on a charge of High Treason on August 3, 1916. He had been arrested on Banna Strand on Country Kerry, on his return to Ireland from Berlin in a German U-boat, hours before the Dublin Easter Rising.
It is not only Latin America, therefore, that has operated within the disjunctive time lags of colonial and postcolonial modernity. Nor, as this story shows, was there necessarily any political disjunction between anti- and postcolonialism. Slavery continues in Brazil today in almost exactly the same conditions described by Casement.[1] Whereas postcolonialism has become associated with diaspora, transnational migration, internationalism, anticolonialism is often identified exclusively, too exclusively, with a provincial nationalism. From the Boer War onwards, however, it rather took the form of a national internationalism. Like postcolonialism, anticolonialism was a diasporic production, a revolutionary mixture of the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, a constellation of situated local knowledges combined with radical, universal political principles, constructed and facilitated through international networks of party cells and organisations, and widespread political contacts between different revolutionary organisations that generated common practical information and material support as well as spreading radical political and intellectual ideas. This decentered anticolonial network, not just a Black Atlantic but a revolutionary globalisation, was constructed to fight a global imperialism.
In the twentieth century, because most of mainland Latin America was already independent, it did not participate in the same way in the twentieth-century anti-colonial movements as the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. This is well illustrated by the great Anti-Colonial Conference held at Brussels in 1927, which was attended by many of the leading figures of the time, Ho Chi Minh, Jomo Kenyatta, Jawaharlal Nehru, Léopold Senghor, George Padmore, and many more. With the exception of the Caribbean, Latin American countries were scarcely involved. The upshot of this was that mainland Latin America did not participate centrally in the history of the anticolonial movements (with the exception of the Guyanas and central American countries such as Belize), and this tendency has been perpetuated in postcolonial theory. Today this history is reiterated when postcolonial theorists look back to the Bandung conference of 1955 as the central historical moment of postcolonial political and ideological positioning: Bandung established the solidarity of Asian and African peoples, but did not stretch to the third continent of the South, Latin America.
Historically, of course, Latin America operates in a kind of anachronistic time lag compared to the rest of the non-western world, namely that the mainland Latin American countries are technically, in chronological terms, scarcely more ‘post-colonial’ than the United States, having achieved independence in the period 1808-25. This meant that in relation to the anti-colonial and non-aligned movements, Latin America was typically absent. It was, on the other hand, semi-colonial China and Latin America that self-consciously developed the anti-colonial movements into a wider global resistance to imperialism. The era of Fanon and Guevara marked a very different political moment from that of Bandung. In political terms, Bandung established the non-aligned movement, an attempt to establish a political identity for the third world distinct from the rival systems of capitalism and communism. It never explicitly involved a political identification with the plight of the subaltern or subaltern peoples, which we would see nowadays as central to postcolonial politics. This political move towards the subaltern was, however, central to what I call tricontinental Marxism. In 1961, Fanon spoke of a revolutionary anti-colonialism in the name of ‘the damned’ (Fanon 1961). In the same year, in a Cuban contrapuntal gesture, Che Guevara spoke of the Cuban revolution as ‘a revolution with humanist characteristics. It is in solidarity with all the oppressed peoples of the world’ (Guevara 1997: 229). In 1973, Galeano would echo Fanon and Guevara, ending The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent with the comment: ‘the task lies in the hands of the dispossessed, the humiliated, the accursed’ (Galeano Eduardo and Belfrage 1973: 283).
Oppressed but not damned, and now resisting: in all cases, what was distinctive was the global reach of the political category: the wretched of the earth; the oppressed peoples of the world. A fundamental global solidarity between ‘the oppressed’ forms the basis of postcolonial politics and epistemology, a solidarity instantiated not at Bandung but six years after the publication of The Wretched of the Earth at the first Conference of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America at Havana in 1966, known more simply as the Tricontinental. The revolutionary politics of the Tricontinental were to break out across the world two years later. Historians have never really quite been able to come to terms with 1968, a revolutionary moment that did not only operate in the more mainstream political domain of other revolutionary moments. This was because the revolution was epistemological as well as political, and it was epistemological in order to be truly revolutionary. If imperialism was, as Said has suggested, a knowledge-producing as well as a more formal political project, then 1968 signalled the moment of the epistemic break, when the dominant form of western knowledge which had increased its homogeneity in an uninterrupted development for the past two hundred years, was broken by the intrusion of a different subject position, different knowledge-formations that were the product of the anti-colonial movements. The subsequent developments of these forms of knowledge are commonly identified with ‘postcolonialism’. For many reasons, including the fact that it includes rather than excludes South America, I prefer to call it not ‘postcolonial’ but ‘tricontinental’.
It nevertheless remains true that in disciplinary terms within the academy, postcolonialism has evolved relatively discretely from Latin American studies in Europe, North America and Asia. This is doubtless partly the result of the different languages, cultural and institutional disciplinary conditions, together with the processes by which new academic fields are constituted, as well as the differences already mentioned between the clearly chronological post-colonial situation of countries such as India, Nigeria or Algeria, which all gained their independence from 1947 onwards, and the situation of Latin America. Latin American and postcolonial theory have developed as different discourses to the extent that they have arisen out of comparable but distinctively different historical problematics. Whereas postcolonial theory emerged largely from the political, philosophical, cultural and psychological analytic critiques of the colonial liberation movements, a body of knowledge and political strategies articulated most forcibly by Gandhi and the Fanon of The Wretched of the Earth, in so-called Latin America the dominant discourses have been concerned with issues of landlessness and agrarian reform, the survival of indigenous peoples and cultures, illiteracy, dependency, development, and modes of cultural resistance, against a continuous US imperialism operating within the self-serving framework of the Monroe Doctrine.
Yet the gap between Latin America and the postcolonial is all the more remarkable given the ‘dependency’ situation and the dominance of the US over the southern continent. In fact, much of the framework of postcolonial studies, be it world systems theory, the economics of dependency and neo-colonialism, actually operates within a general framework originally developed in Latin America. In that sense ‘postcolonialism’ as an academic practice is in many ways already Latin American, a product of the Caribbean revolutionary tradition, explicitly operating on the basis of the world system theory developed out of dependency theory by Immanuel Wallerstein. Moreover, from a theoretical point of view, the history of Latin America, and of the political-intellectual response to that history, includes many characteristics of the histories that produced ‘postcolonialism’: internationalism; revolutionary theory designed to bring about self-determination, national and theoretical autonomy; together with Marxist analyses of the problems of cultural domination and neocolonialism, and dependency, and the fundamental tricontinental identification with peasant or more generally subaltern revolution. This compatibility has recently been signalled by the emergence of ‘Subaltern Studies’ historians in Latin America – it was, after all, in Latin America in 1910 that peasant revolution first emerged as a significant political force within the politics of modernity.
Despite this, postcolonial theory and the forms of its political critiques, it could be argued, have yet to come to terms with Latin America. Even the Caribbean tends to be regarded in Britain at least as a part of the Anglophone Black Atlantic, not as part of Latin America. In the recent past, there has been relatively little transculturation in the contact zone between the Latin American and the Anglophone academic worlds. From a Latin American perspective, it is not only that much of postcolonial studies looks somewhat déja-vu: it doubtless becomes even more frustrating to Latin Americanists when postcolonial theory appears apparently promulgating ideas that it claims are original ones of its own that had been formulated in Latin America long ago. The frustration when what they regard as their own cultural concepts take on a separate life outside Latin America without acknowledgement is fully understandable given the historical context of the central problematic and desire to overcome dependency. Just when they think of something really original, the US academy offers it back to them as if it were its own!
In no area, perhaps, does this seem to be more the case than with the concept of hybridity. Hybridity has become the cultural marker par excellence of postcolonial societies in western metropolises transformed by the effects of immigration as well as in the cultures of former colonies in which legacies of feudalism are juxtaposed with forms of modernity and postmodernity. Whereas the preoccupation with the peasantry has been a common feature of much tricontinental political radicalism, from China to Algeria to Brazil, indigenismo, mestizo identity and hybridity would more properly be seen to involve political preoccupations more particular to Latin America, pioneered in the twenties by Mariátegui in Peru and the thirties by Gilberto Freyre in Brazil. ‘Hybridity’, as Néstor Garcia Canclini observes, ‘has a long trajectory in Latin American cultures’ (García Canclini 1995: 241).
What I want to do today is to look a little at one example of that long trajectory, the work of Gilberto Freyre in Brazil, and specifically at how hybridity was formulated as a racial and distinct cultural concept by Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s. Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves dates from 1933; it was first translated into English in 1946 (Freyre 1933; 1946). When one considers what was going on in the rest of the world at that time, it was no small thing for him to propose a positive account of hybridity in that book. In fact, though, the idea was not original to Freyre, even if he emerged as the major proponent of the idea in Brazil. It had been proposed for half a century at least by various Latin American intellectuals, above all in Mexico. Why did Freyre’s theory become the best known?
The history of political, social and cultural attitudes towards race in Latin America is extremely complex but it was certainly subject to the impact of European racial theories from the Conquest onwards. In the independence period, from the nineteenth century onwards, there were broadly three possible positions: the independence movement, as in the US, was a settler anti-colonialism, and as in the US it left the white settlers in power. The dominant attitude towards race for much of the century therefore reflected the Creole white supremacist position. Other ethnic groups, notably the American Indians, were seen as either a necessary servile labour force, or as an undesirable group to be exterminated, as in Argentina.
In the mid-century, however, two other possible positions emerged: either indigenismo movements that began to develop the idea of a national identity based on the historical roots of the country in indigenous peoples and their cultures, and therefore favouring the Indian over the Creole or mixed populations, as in Peru and in Chile (in Peru, Mariátegui is probably the best known single figure in this context), or the argument that the true ‘race’ of Latin America is now the mestizo, who combines both. That idea was promulgated in Peru, Chile, and Brazil, but its real centre was Mexico. The reasons for this are historical, not only because Mexico was more mixed in racial terms, but also because of the problems after independence, in which war with the US in 1846-8, and continuing ethnic/class conflict resulted in the invasion of French and British forces in 1861, and the brief imposition of the emperor Maximilian of Austria from 1864-7. Nationalist reaction to European interference, and a radical attitude to social conflict that was the product of ethnic division, meant that from the 1870s onwards, increasingly the mestizo and mestiza was promulgated as the true man and woman of the nation and miscegenation was increasingly advocated as a solution to Mexico’s social and political problems.
The context for the development of theories of hybridity in Mexico and Latin America goes back, as always, to European racial theory, such as I have outlined in Colonial Desire (Young 1995). This in fact made it rather difficult to be modern, and endorse scientific racial theory, and advocate hybridity. For in the nineteenth century, it was customary for racial theorists and racialist Europeans to instance the apparent chaos of Latin American politics (to European eyes) in order to prove the disastrous effects of miscegenation. By the 1850s, political and racial theorists alike invoked what they termed the racial anarchy (that is, the racial intermixture) of South America and identified the political instability of its states with what was called the ‘raceless chaos’ of its population. Inversely, political stability was associated with the purity of the racial type. A forthright article in the Anthropological Review, reviewing J.S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty and On Representative Government, criticised what the reviewer termed Mill’s `unwise rejection of the racial element' in his political philosophy, together with his lack of consideration of the differing aptitude of `the various races for political liberty'. Such `deficiencies and misconceptions', in the reviewer's view, were augmented by his lack of reference to:
hybridism, as an obstruction to the formation and maintenance of a stable government. It is, of course, quite legitimate in logic, for the man who does not believe in race, to deny or ignore the existence of half-castes. But, unfortunately nature will not so ignore them, as Mexico and the South American republics have found to their cost. Where the parental elements are very diverse, the hybrid is himself a fermenting monstrosity. He is ever a more or less chaotic compound. He is in conflict with himself, and but too often exhibits the vices of both parents without the virtues of either. He is a blot on creation, the product of a sin against nature, whom she hastens with all possible expedition to reduce to annihilation. He is not in healthful equilibrium, either mental or physical, and consequently cannot conduce to the stability of anything else. He is ever oscillating between his paternal and maternal proclivities. His very instincts are perverted. (Farrar 1866: 129).
As in the United States during the Civil War, where racial mixing was always associated with the liberal amalgamationists, liberal attitudes towards race were associated by those on the right with the extreme liberalism of racial and political anarchy. In racial theory, people of mixed race were described as physically and mentally degenerate, and this attitude towards miscegenation formed part of the racial ideology put into practice in the eugenics programmes of the Nazis in Germany – and not only in Nazi Germany but in Sweden and other European countries, as well as in former colonies such as Australia, Argentina and Paraguay. All eugenics programmes operated on the assumption of the desirability of whiteness and racial purity.
As this suggests, the writer in the Anthropological Review was not simply being idiosyncratic: in fact the father of social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, was later fully to endorse such a view, stating apparently definitively that mixed race societies were destined to anarchy – and as his example, he cited the Mexican mestizo:
The half-caste, inheriting from one line of ancestry proclivities adapted to one set of institutions, and from the other line of ancestry proclivities adapted to another set of institutions, is not fitted for either. He is a unit whose nature has not been moulded by any social type, and therefore cannot, with others like himself, evolve any social type. Modern Mexico and the South American republics, with their perpetual revolutions, show us the result. (Spencer 1876: 592).
Notwithstanding this widely accepted argument, as Basave Benítes has demonstrated, several influential Mexican writers, notably Franciso Pimentel, Vicente Riva Palacio, Andrés Molina Enríquez, Manuel Gamio, above all on nationalist impulses, managed to adapt Spencer’s own theories to produce a Mexican counter-point in which the mestizo became the essence of the nation, and political and cultural conflict was resolved by the production of a new Hispano-American race (Basave Benítez 1992; Pimentel 1864; Molina Enríquez 1909; Gamio and Comas 1953; Gamio 1935). In the grandest claims such as those of José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), these ideas were turned into a call for the unification of mestizo America. In his La rasa cosmica (1900) and Indologia (1926), Vasconcelos claimed that Mexico embodied a new racial synthesis, a fifth race based in Ibero-America, able to triumph over the hated Anglo-Saxons (Vasconcelos 1900; 1934; 1937; 1978). As a form of political identification, the Latino-nationalist version of this ‘mestizophilia’ was most famously endorsed in the ‘Our mestizo America’ of the great Cuban nationalist José Martí in 1891. It was subsequently incorporated into the official ideology of the nationalist regime of Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico in the 1930s. From that moment on, while remaining a counter-identity at the national level to Anglo USA, mestizo and mestiza identity within the hispanic American nations itself became the hegemonic form that in turn excluded local minorities, particularly those who remained unmixed, notably the indigenous Indian population and – wherever they existed in substantial numbers – the descendents of African slaves (de la Cadena 2000; Warren 2001). The invention of Afro-Cuba was effected by Fernando Ortiz, that of Afro-Brazil by Gilberto Freyre (Ortiz 1947; 1950).
By the twentieth century, the mestizophiles were able to make use of the fact that in the academic discipline responsible for the whole grotesque theory of human hybridity, anthropology, there had been a concerted effort, particularly by the American anthropologist Franz Boas, to contest its assumptions. Through his work, conducted as early as 1910-11, showing how diet and environment affected what had been assumed as biologically determined racial characteristics, Boas was able to prove that any examples of apparent hybrid sickliness and degeneracy were the result of social conditions rather than the product of being mixed race. It was Boas who contested the racial aspects of degeneration theory: if people really were degenerating physically, he showed that this was because of the appalling social conditions in which they lived, not because of their racial origins (Boas 1898; Boas et al. 1905; Dillingham William et al. 1911; Boas 1911-1912). To his great credit, wherever race is contested as a scientific concept in this period, anywhere in the world, the references run back to the influence of Boas’ work. In Gilberto Freyre’s case, that influence was direct: he studied under Boas at Columbia University in New York in the 1920s. In the Preface to The Masters and the Slaves, Freyre describes himself as arriving at Columbia ‘intensely preoccupied’ with the destiny of Brazil.
And of all the problems confronting Brazil there was none that gave me so much anxiety as that of miscegenation. (Freyre 1946: xx. Further references will be cited as page numbers in the text)
In New York, after three years away, Freyre caught sight of some Brazilian seamen crossing Brooklyn Bridge, and records: ‘they impressed me as being the caricatures of men, and there came to mind a phrase from a book on Brazil written by an American traveler: “the fearfully mongrel aspect of the population”. This was the sort of thing to which miscegenation led’ (xxi). Studying under Boas enabled Freyre to confront directly the problem of the problem of Brazilian society being, as he put it, ‘one of the most lacking in eugenic prestige of all modern peoples’ (61).
Boas enabled him to contest the assumption of inferiority and degeneration, and to consider the issue in terms of ‘the effects of environment or cultural experience separated from racial characteristics’. If the men looked like that, they were the products of the conditions in which they lived. Beyond that, Freyre writes, ‘I learnt to regard as fundamental the difference between race and culture, to discriminate between the effects of purely genetic relationships and those resulting from social influences, the cultural heritage and the milieu’ (xxi). The Masters and the Slaves is predicated on this basic distinction between race and culture, and must have been one of the earliest books to have incorporated what became a fundamental criterion of British sociology and the race relations industry only in the 1960s. Freyre, however, did not dispute the notion of race altogether, continuing for example to describe particular racial characteristics to Indians, Africans and the Portuguese, but he did deny its fixed ontological function in relation to cultural phenomena.
Boas allowed Freyre to argue that Brazil, far from being disadvantaged by miscegenation, drew its fundamental strength and energy from a racial and cultural hybridity that effectively operated as mirrors of each other. Freyre claimed that the free relations, particularly the free sexual relations, of masters and slaves under the latifundia system – the system that still exists in Brazil of vast aristocratic estates, some of them larger than some European countries – had been the main contributor to the racial mixing of the population, that this had offset the effects of social division and eventually produced a form of social democracy in Brazil. At the same time, the exploitative and oppressive latifundia system had been responsible for the hyponutrition – chronic hunger – and disease that had produced effects of poor physique and infertility hitherto attributed to miscegenation. The physical environment and social conditions of Brazil thus affected its people. Conversely, the Portuguese colonisers were able to impose upon the environment their own cultural forms that they brought with them as immigrants. Through this form of hybridity, of ‘plastic compromise’ (xxvi), while physically, the people became more mixed, culturally they became more European. Brazil, Freyre argued, was a Luso-American society, a European society transported to the tropics – lusotropical. While the social structure of traditional Brazil remained an antagonistic one of masters and slaves, miscegenation, Freyre claimed, acted ‘as a lubricating oil between cultures’ (index xxx). ‘The formation of Brazilian society’, he argued, ‘has been in reality a process of balancing antagonisms. Economic and cultural antagonisms. Antagonisms between European and native culture. Between the African and the native. Between an agrarian and a pastoral economy’ and many others, of which, predominant over all, was that of master and slave’ (79-80). At the same time, other conditions have acted ‘upon all these clashing antagonistic forces, deadening the shock or harmonising them’, conditions peculiar to Brazil and contributing to social mobility and fraternization, the first of which was miscegenation.
Throughout the book, Freyre emphasises the ‘milieu of Brazilian life’ as ‘one of sexual intoxication’ (85): if he characterises Brazilian society as ‘hybrid from the beginning’ (83), it is in terms of what he considers harmonious racial relations, ‘within an environment of a practical cultural reciprocity that results in the advanced people deriving the maximum of profit from the values and experiences of the backward ones, and in a maximum of conformity between the foreign and the native cultures, that of the conqueror and the conquered’ (83). In this thesis, Freyre is in fact rewriting one version of Brazil’s own national myth, the story articulated in 1865 by José de Alencar in Iracema (later parodied but also critically reinterpreted in Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928) (Alencar 1964; Andrade Mário 1928). In this romantic, allegorical novel, the heroine Iracema, a beautiful, brown Tabajara Indian woman, whose very name is also an anagram of America, falls in love with and seduces a Portuguese soldier, Martim, and bears his child, Moacir, who presages and initiates the destiny of the new race and nation, Brazil. Freyre, in a study of Alencar published in 1955, applauded his innovative emphasis on the non-Aryan foundations of the Brazilian nation. However, Freyre also differs from Alencar in one radical way in so far as Alencar’s narrative of the Brazilian nation is an entirely European-Indian affair: Africans are entirely excluded from the orbit of national identity.
Although he shares Alencar’s perspective to the extent that European identity absorbs and assimilates other cultures without losing its dominant role (in the novel, Iracema herself dies and the grieving Martim is left to nurture the child as they voyage into futurity), in The Masters and the Slaves, Freyre offers an alternative, more dialectical originary narrative of national identity. Hybridity, in Freyre’s account, is a force contributing towards harmony: it is hybridity that resolves the antagonistic social relations on which Brazilian society is founded. It is not, however, at this stage, anything quite like fusion; it does not go so far as creolisation. Freyre talks of how Brazilian culture shows particular individual features which demonstrate different cultural influences. If the European element is forced to compete with other ‘ethnic elements’ on an equal basis, it remains the case that the masters remain dominant (83). Indeed, Freyre ends the Preface to the first edition of The Masters and the Slaves by lamenting the abolition of the patriarchal system of the latifundia with the abolition of slavery in 1888.
So, in Freyre’s account, hybridity is a force that resolves the antagonistic social relations on which Brazilian society was founded. By the Preface to the American edition of 1946, Freyre was claiming that hybridity had produced a benign, harmonious ‘union of cultures’ and the distinctive absence of ‘race hatred’ in Brazil (xii). Freyre also makes greater claims for the democratising tendencies brought on by hybridity, interpreting ‘the formation of Brazilian society in the light of a “synthetic principle”’ which he argues does not exist elsewhere. The antagonism and distance between masters and slaves ‘had their force broken by the interpenetrating of cultures and by miscegenation’, and ‘miscegenation and the interpenetration of cultures’ has meant that the course of Brazilian history has been ‘a march towards social democracy’ (xiv). In immediate historical terms, of course, it was marching towards the dictatorship of 1964, though to be fair in 1946 Freyre could hardly have anticipated the US counter-revolutionary response throughout Latin America to the Cuban Revolution.
It is clear that Freyre’s concept of hybridity was very different from those that have emerged in recent postcolonial or Latin American theory. The positivity of Freyre’s message was more akin to negritude, a reversal of racial hierarchies, than to more contemporary accounts which emphasize culture over race. Although he distinguished racial and cultural elements, for Freyre the two remained profoundly complementary. As time went on, and the influence of Boas receded into the background, the racial thesis in fact became increasingly fundamental to Freyre’s argument. In The Mansions and the Shanties (1951), a sequel to The Masters and the Slaves, he developed the idea of a distinct Brazilian Luso-American society, placing more emphasis on its distinguishing cultural factors (Freyre 1963). He also, however, gave greater attention to miscegenation, being particularly keen to compare the Brazilian situation with that in South Africa and the Southern United States. In the book, Freyre emphasises more strongly the role of social factors on the pathology of mixed race groups, discussing them in very traditional categories, but always denying biological determinism. He is also prepared to concede that ‘it is unlikely that Brazil will ever be, like Argentina, an almost European country; or like Mexico or Paraguay, an Amerindian one. The substance of African culture will remain with us throughout all our formation and consolidation as a nation’. The features of African culture, such as religions traditions, however, will ‘acquire new forms through their transculturation with European and native values’ (Freyre 1963: 419). The emphasis remains on racial mixing, together with a lesser stress on ‘the reciprocity between cultures’, on ‘cultural synthesis’. Freyre rejects separate development and Aryanisation. He rejects determinism, while allowing conditioning. ‘Many of the qualities associated with race have developed as the result of historic or, rather, dynamic forces exerted on the group and the individual’ (Freyre 1963: 422-7).
Having established this claim for Brazilian distinctiveness, Freyre’s subsequent career forms a cautionary tale. Invited to the States to lecture in 1944-5, he produced Brazil: A Reinterpretation (1945), later expanded and rewritten as New World in the Tropics (1959) (Freyre 1945; 1959). His writing became increasingly nationalist in tone, as he promoted the thesis that in contrast to the US, there was no racial problem in Brazil, and that everyone lived together in a democratic and egalitarian social harmony. He even invoked the old thesis of a special masculist ‘hybrid vigour’, cross-breeding producing the paulistas, described as ‘a new and stable type of man or race, known for their vigour, their endurance, their fighting capacity, and the qualities or virtues of pioneers’ (Freyre 1959: 73). Freyre’s promotion of Brazil as the counterpoint to American problems was understandable as a delicious reversal of dependency. The cost was an increasing nationalism and implication that Brazil was developing a new racial type. The favour with which his thesis was held by liberals in the US meant that from the 1950s onwards, money, much of it from UNESCO, was poured into the study of Brazilian society on the basis of its offering a solution to the ‘problem’ of race. What those studies found, of course, was that in fact Brazilians of African and Indian descent faced widespread discrimination (Fernandes and Bastide 1955).
More remarkable still than the liberal endorsement of Freyre’s work was the adoption of his notion of lusotropicalism by the fascist Portuguese government of Dr Salazar. Portugal was the last of the European imperial powers to cling on to its empire, in part because it was entirely dependent economically on its colonies. Salazar had always insisted on the unity of what he called ‘Portugal, one and indivisible, from Minho to Timor’. The chief ideologist of the regime, the Secretary of National Propaganda, Antonio Ferro, instituted the state ideology of a mystical ‘portugality’ (portugalidade) as the basis for the empire’s indivisible unity. This mysticalism was inevitably somewhat spectral, and was not enough to counter the increasing global hostility to Portuguese imperialism nor to justify the continuing existence of the Portuguese empire. Initially refused membership of the United Nations on the dual grounds of its fascism and its empire, and under UN pressure to decolonise, Portugal increasingly adopted an assimilationist model claiming racial and cultural hybridity as the benign policy of its colonial regimes in Africa and Asia. To do this, it looked to its former colony of Brazil and enlisted the willing support of Gilberto Freyre.
In the 1950s, Freyre accepted an invitation from Salazar’s government to visit Angola and other colonies and began to pronounce on the formation of a very different black Atlantic culture, that of Lusotropical civilisation ‘spread over America, Africa and the East ... characterised by a greater or less assimilation of tropical values to the heritage of European culture’. On the one hand, this allowed Freyre to argue that the ‘surpassing of the ethnic condition by the cultural characterises the Lusotropical civilisation’ (Freyre 1959: 46-7). On the other hand, he confidently pronounced the appearance of this new civilisation in countries that remained under some of the most oppressive forms of colonial domination in modern history. This operates as a cautionary tale for any account of hybridity of this kind: though in a relatively monocultural society it may work as a progressive concept, it is not intrinsically so—hybridity can work in both directions. Freyre’s ideas became the dominant self-justificatory ideology of the Portuguese fascist colonial state, a situation which Freyre is increasingly vocal anti-communism and emphasis on the ‘christological’ basis of Lusotropical civilisation facilitated. The lusotropical Atlantic did not, however, go unchallenged.
For strategic reasons, the emphasis in Freyre’s notion of the lusotropical at this time increasingly moved towards ideas of integration: In 1961, he published Portuguese Integration in the Tropics, a translation of Integraçao portuguesa nos trópicos (1958) (Freyre 1961b). In the same year, Freyre also published simultaneously in Portuguese and in English The Portuguese and the Tropics. Suggestions inspired by the Portuguese Methods of integrating autochthonous peoples and cultures differing from the European in a new, or Luso-Tropical complex of civilisation (Freyre 1961a). The Angolan people broke out in armed insurrection against the Portuguese. In fact, the anti-colonial leader Mario de Andrade had already attacked the claim for a lusotropical Atlantic as early as 1955. In an article in Présence Africaine he described Freyre’s trip around the Portuguese colonies as ‘modern colonial mystification’, and denounced lusotropicalism as ‘entirely false under the colonial circumstances of Africa’. ‘There has never been’, he wrote,
in tropical counties under Portuguese domination, certainly not in Africa, an act of marriage between two cultures … but rather the relation of a dominating culture to dominated ones. (Braganca Aquino and Wallerstein 1982: 151-2).
That domination, as Cabral, Mondlane, and others in the UPA, MAC, MPLA, CONCP, PAIGC & FRELIMO – to name only some of the anti-Portuguese alliances – argued, was essentially based on the Portuguese ‘parasite’ economy not assimilating the colonies, but living off their labour and natural resources. That was the reality of Portuguese lusotropicalism in Africa. Despite the ideology of lusotropical hybridity, in fact less than 1% of black Angolans became assimilados.
Although Freyre had confidently announced that pan-Africanism was meaningless for African Brazilians, in Brazil too, far from assimilating to the masters, a more militant tendency was emerging among African-Brazilians, evident for example in Florestan Fernandes’ The Black Man in the White Man’s World (Fernandes 1972). In 1974, the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania – the first ever to be held on African soil – was attended by the first ever delegation from Brazil. In an address called ‘Cultural Resolution and the Future of Pan African Culture’, the speaker for the delegation from Brazil, Abdias de Nascimento, gave an account of holding the first Pan-African convention in Brazil at Campinas in 1938, together with a history of black resistance in Brazil, starting with the establishment in the 1630s of ‘the first government of free Africans in the new world, a truly African state, known as the Republic of Palmares’ – thus, incidentally, predating the establishment of what is often called the first Black republic of Haiti by nearly two centuries. I cannot pursue that story now, except to remark its affirmation against Freyre of 500 years of African resistance, and its identification not with a Lusotropical Atlantic, but with the Black Atlantic of the African diaspora (Pan African 1976: 180-9). For its part, Freyre’s ‘lusotropicology’ has long since been retrieved and reforged as an authentically Brazilian rather than colonial Portuguese ‘tropicalismo’ (for example in the work of Silviano Santiago) (Santiago 1978).
The transculturation of Freyre’s lusotropical hybridity to Angola from Brazil brings out the fact that although it is supposed to operate within a power structure of domination and dominated, its only function according to Freyre is to reduce this social antagonism that results from the iniquitous power structure to harmony. The creation of that harmony is largely the result of the exercise of power through sexual exploitation by the patriarchs of the ruling class. The model does allow for transformation on both sides, rather than the assimilation of the lower into the higher, as in the Aryanisation model. Mixture here operates as a model of assimilation, predominantly on the terms of the dominant European class or race, even if it also involves forms of creolisation for that class at the level of certain cultural characteristics, such as speech and cuisine. Effectively, however, lusotropical hybridity is opposed to any form of contestation by the oppressed or the subaltern, and does not offer any form of agency or means of resistance to them.
What does the history of Freyre’s work tell us? How did it happen that his apparently progressive ideas were taken up by liberals, but then subsequently went in a different direction to become the state ideology of fascism and imperialism? The major difference would be that in Latin America hybridity was developed as a concept to define national identity in underlying racial-cultural terms against an external but dominant Anglo-America, in the US and UK it was introduced internally against national cultures which saw themselves as essentially white. This meant that for Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico, hybridity became incorporated into a form of nationalism, in the US and UK it was anti-nationalistic. That it could be adopted by the Portuguese empire shows most clearly that the idea of cultural mixture is not ipso facto a progressive idea: its politics are determined by its context. It can be used for oppressive forms of nationalism and imperialism as well as to break up European or Asian nationalisms based on notions of racial purity. So long as the concept of hybridity is derived from a model of biological reproduction, its political possibilities remain limited to nationalism and anti-nationalism.
It also shows the limitations of the model if it conforms, and continues to conform, to the structure of the underlying biological metaphor. Although contemporary theorists such as Néstor García Canclini have removed the heavy biological emphasis to be found in Freyre, the underlying problems, which included the question of power, remain. As Renato Rosaldo has suggested in his introduction to García Canclini’s Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity:
The term hybridity, as used by García Canclini, never resolves the tension between its conceptual polarities. On the one hand, hybridity can imply a space betwixt and between two zones of purity in a manner that follows biological usage that distinguishes two discrete species and the hybrid pseudospecies that results from their combination…. On the other hand, hybridity can be understood as the ongoing condition of all human cultures, which contain no zones of purity because they undergo continuous processes of transculturation (two-way borrowing and lending between cultures). Instead of hybridity versus purity, this view suggests that it is hybridity all the way down (as I would suggest, for example, it is in Paul Gilroy’s work). From this perspective, one must explain how ideological zones of cultural purity, whether of national culture or ethnic resistance, have been constructed.
Rosaldo suggests that García Canclini himself ‘never resolves the tension between the two conceptual poles of hybridity, but his analysis favors the former over the latter position’ (García Canclini 1995: xv-xvi). Even here it is notable that hybridity is represented either as the mixture of two prior pure forms, or as a state of originary mixture. In the context of Rosaldo and Garcia Canclini, this is the result of the history of hybridity as a central component of Mexican and Brazilian cultural nationalism, which, as in Freyre, always lurks behind its use as a metaphor of cultural interaction. As John Kraniauskas has argued in a brilliant essay comparing theories of hybridity in García Canclini and Homi K. Bhabha, García Canclini’s work, despite its use of hybridity as a means of interrogating the competing temporalities of modernity, retains ‘an over-emphasis on national and post-national identities’ (Kraniauskas 2000: 249). In either case, as the delegates to the Pan-African Congress effectively demonstrated, the idea of hybridity as mixing does not offer an obvious politics of resistance and contestation if it has been incorporated into the ideology of the state. Its implications are, in the national model, more those of Freyre, for whom it resolves antagonism. This is why an abandonment of the biological model is important, indeed essential, and why postcolonial theories of hybridity, notably those of Homi K. Bhabha, have focussed on retheorising hybridity according to linguistic and subsequently spatio-temporal models in which hybridity involves not a fusion but a splitting. For Bhabha, hybridity involves a combative process of cultural and political negotiation for minorities excluded from the very terms by which the political sphere is constituted (Bhabha 1994). This is a very different account from those of the Latin Americans, whether Freyre or García Canclini.
Despite the care and radical formulation of these accounts, the problem with hybridity often involves the way in which when it is taken up more generally, the older, colonial forms repeat seamlessly in the enunciations of the present. What is curious and provocative about Freyre’s work is how its politics changed in different geographical contexts of Latin America and the US or Britain. In many ways, in Brazil itself it began as a progressive and liberal attitude at least in so far as it saw Africans and African culture as an integral part of Brazilian identity. Abroad, Freyre’s work went simultaneously in two directions, invoked simultaneously by the ideologues of Portuguese imperialism, and by liberals in the US and Britain in 1960s and 1970s. In Britain, under Freyre’s influence, biological hybridisation was proposed as an early solution to what was then called the problem of the ‘colour bar’, by radicals such as the Jamaican sociologist Fernando Henriques, who taught at Sussex University. Freyre himself in fact visited and spoke at Henriques’ Research Centre for the Study of Multi-Racial Societies in 1966 (Freyre 1966). In his book Children of Caliban; Miscegenation, Henriques puts the Freyre of Masters and Slaves together on the same page with the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks (Henriques 1974: 91). Some of those working in Cultural Studies in Britain now even claim that when they used the word ‘hybridity’ in the 1990s it had nothing to do with its meaning in the 1970s – that it just happened, by pure chance, to be the same word. There seems little point, however, in British cultural theorists trying to deny the complex historical relations between European racial theory, the development of concepts of mestizo identity in Caribbean anti-colonial and Latin American anti-imperial nationalism, and contemporary cultural theories of hybridity (Hall 1996). What those historical relations demonstrate is that while mestizo America and postcolonial hybridity are intimately interlinked, their specific forms are also the products of locational differences and constitute political interventions in distinctly dissimilar social situations. Today, the dynamics of postcoloniality necessarily involves the insight that the colonial past and its hegemonic forms should be repeated only so that they can be displaced and interrupted in the present. If the postcolonial is going to ‘make modernity stutter’, as Kraniauskas puts it, then the perverse legacies of lusotropical hybridity must be effectively reinscribed with the disruptive forces of postcolonial countermodernity.
In that context, I want to end with the observation that there was, in fact, already a Brazilian counterpoint to Freyre, which takes us straight back to the radical, more combatative politics of the Tricontinental. Gilberto was contested by Paulo Freire, in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed of 1970 (Freire 1970). I am not now going to try to discuss its provocative arguments in any comprehensive way, nor the ways in which it might be reread so as to involve issues of gender or minorities. I simply want to note that Freire’s commitment to challenging what he calls ‘cultural invasion’, hegemonic cultural domination, by transforming ‘the oppressed’, subalterns, into actor-subjects of history is predicated on a dialogic structure whose implications do note date for anyone concerned with the politics of education, whether institutionally or in other terms. Cultural action, for Freyre, is the product of a dialogic relation between those whom Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘collective intellectuals’ and the people, a synthesis that is itself set in a dialogic, contestatory relation to the social structure. Moreover, rather than infiltration or reinscription, ‘cultural action’, as Freyre puts it,
Cultural action, as historical action, is an instrument for superseding the dominant alienated and alienating culture. (Freire 1970: 147)
That political-cultural transformation, whose object involves continuing political challenge in order to bring about the end of social inequality and injustice, remains the basis for a postcolonial politics of intervention, founded unequivocally on the demand of the Tricontinental for a local and transnational social justice.
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