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Gilberto freyre the masters and the slaves
Gilberto freyre the masters and the slaves











gilberto freyre the masters and the slaves gilberto freyre the masters and the slaves

The book’s Portuguese title refers to the relationship between the landowner’s house and the slave quarters, as it constitutes a study of the domestic arrangements that developed on the sugar plantations in Brazil’s North East between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The link between cordiality and cruelty is also explored to provide a context for articles that reflect on the frailties of Brazilian state apparatuses, which have led to social breakdown, and even to the use of coercion or torture.Īn investigation of cordiality and intimacy in contemporary Brazilian culture must inevitably begin with an exploration of the seminal texts that earned these concepts their status as alleged “national traits.” For this, it is necessary to return to the 1930s when the popularity of culturalist approaches and essayistic academic writing saw the publication of Gilberto Freyre’s renowned Casa-grande & senzala/ The Masters and the Slaves, in 1933. The recent wave of Brazilian cinema and TV series that focuses on the figure of the maid evocatively foregrounds the continuing primacy of intimate relationships in Brazil, including in films by Anna Muylaert and Kleber Mendonça Filho, which are analysed in this issue. The articles enclosed are informed by Holanda’s suggestion that the country’s colonial heritage and patriarchal culture has complicated the institution of a clear distinction between the private (familial) and public realms. While Freyre emphasises the formative influence of the close ties between Afro-Brazilian wet-nurses and landowning families in the colonial era, Holanda’s schematisation of the “cordial man” focuses on the sinister consequences of the Brazilian drive towards intimacy. It traces these purported “national traits” back to their exploration in Gilberto Freyre’s renowned Casa-grande & senzala (1933) and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil (1936). This article serves as an introduction to a special issue on intimacy and cordiality in contemporary Brazilian cultural production.













Gilberto freyre the masters and the slaves