Elsewhere I have suggested how both Freyre’s original oeuvre and its subsequent popularization have been tied to postcolonial concerns stemming from Brazil’s historical experience of double colonization . Here I will retrace how the interest in culture Freyre bequeathed to Brazilian diplomacy has been shaped by a similarly multi-layered postcolonial topography, directed both inwards and outwards to the Brazilian nation-state.After reading Black Skin, White Masks, Freyre’s reference to the Brazilian mestizo sailors as “caricatures of men” has retrospectively stricken me as a somewhat Fanonian moment. But the situation here is different: it is not about seeing oneself being seen by a other, as tragically happened with Fanon in the train . This was a member of Brazil’s white elite looking at exemplars of the mixed-race Brazilian populace and seeing them as they would have been seen by a other – this time not a French child but an “American traveler”. Freyre’s gaze at the mestizo seamen is that of internal colonialism; but this inferiorizing gaze is itself profoundly shaped by another relation of subalternity, vis-à-vis a hegemonic other. In this sort of two-directional double consciousness – to use Du Bois’s term –, the Creole elite intellectual’s subjectivity is torn between these two relations, one where he is the master and the other where he is the slave, and where both counterparts are at once other and self to him. In these recollections,growing bags a disheartened young Freyre would have been comforted had somebody convinced him that those men’s “mongrel aspect” stemmed less from biology than from an unfavorable environment that made them “sick”.

A few years later, Freyre would – according to Pallares-Burke , in retrospect – identify that somebody with no one other than Franz Boas, the founding father of American culturalist anthropology. In a context of “intense preoccupation” with “Brazil’s destiny”, Boas’s defense of culture as an analytical alternative to race came in handy as a solution for the “age-old question” of miscegenation faced by Freyre and “others of his generation”. At that moment in Brazil, race-based thinking was not only prevalent among many scientists and intellectuals, but sustained a whitening ideology that proposed the augmentation of the European component of the Brazilian population through immigration as a way out of the degeneration straitjacket imposed by miscegenation . The Master and the Slaves’ tour-de-force therefore consisted precisely in turning what was up to then regarded as a hindrance to the flourishing of “Brazilian civilization” into a unique positive asset for the country’s nation-building at a moment when this was in high demand.The replacement of an analytics of race with one of culture allowed not only for discounting biological explanations according to which the solution to the problem of miscegenation would be a dubious whitening process,but for a shift in self-consciousness whereby Brazil came to see itself as more “civilized” than racially segregated nations like the United States. Even though Freyre’s story is itself more complex, what came down in history as Brazil’s nation-building commonsense was the notion of the Brazilian Volksgeist as a harmonious mixture of the three races, with the African component occupying center stage side-by-side the Portuguese.In the miscegenation of races prompted by the Portuguese’s supposedly inherent tendency to mix with tropical peoples would lay Brazil’s national character, its unique contribution to the Herderian garden of the common good – one could hypothesize, another echo of the Romantic vein Freyre shared with the Boasian school. As the dimension of culture was brought to the foreground, its underbelly – race – became eclipsed without however disappearing: it became a spectral presence in Brazil’s dealings with Africa and African-Brazilians.

As I have argued , Freyre’s postcolonial thrust was therefore not anticolonial strictly speaking, but was a response to a context of “double colonization” where the cultural legacy of the former Portuguese metropolis became not only a sort of “friendly colonialism”, but itself an element of subaltern affirmation vis-à-vis a new hegemony, that of Western Europe . But The Masters and the Slaves was also predicated on a sort of internal postcolonial thrust whereby Freyre tried to simultaneously rescue the lost prestige of his own subaltern region, the Brazilian Northeast, by elevating the status of its culture from regional to national. Colonial sugar estates in the Northeastern coast are, after all, the stage on which the foundational myth of Brazilian nationhood is played in Freyre’s masterpiece. By the time he was writing it, this region had long lost the political and economic weight it held during colonial times to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the Southeast. From the standpoint of this new domestic hegemony, the Northeast came to be seen in terms of the same dichotomies through which Brazil saw itself in relation to Western normativity – traditional/modern, backwards/progressive, rural/urban . Finally, a couple of decades later, Freyre’s ideas folded back into Portugal’s own colonial imaginary: while his 1933 classic focused on the cultural formation of the Brazilian nation, from the 1950’s onwards similar claims were extrapolated to the second wave of Portuguese colonization, in Africa and Asia . Lustropicalismo thus became a transnational alternative to Western European normativity based on “a distinct mode of ‘assimilation’ engendered by the Portuguese colonial presence in the tropics based on the three pillars of miscegenation, cultural fusion and absence of racial prejudices” . Just as the racial harmony ideology appealingly catered to nationalist appetites in Brazil, Lusotropicality was eagerly taken up by the ideological apparatus of the Estado Novo regime to shore up its colonial project against mounting independence struggles in Africa and international pressure by, among others, the United States, the United Nations, and the nascent non-aligned movement.

Many Brazilians joined Portugal’s ranks in this ideological struggle, not the least Gilberto Freyre himself, who “found a patron in the Portuguese government, and seized upon what he saw in the Portuguese African colonies as a present-day laboratory demonstrating the processes of cultural and racial mixture that he described in colonial Brazil” . Freyre’s vulgarized after-life in Brazil and in Portugal unfolded largely through channels like diplomacy, the educational system, and dimensions of popular culture such as music or soccer . As is often the case, in this process of popularization the richness of Freyre’s genius was reduced to a simplistic, usable version. As such, it was able to circulate farther and amalgamate into later waves of nation-building and international projection efforts in Brazil and elsewhere, reaching up to present South-South cooperation activities. Along this way, as we saw, contradictions inevitably sprang up between such imaginations about Africa and Brazilians’ concrete engagements with Africans. The way Brazilians’ views on Africa have been infused by Freyre’s ideas is highly suggestive of parallels with Edward Said’s Orientalism. In this, I am particularly inspired by Said’s claim that when the West looks at the East as its other,nursery grow bag it sees it less in its coeval actuality than in terms of imaginations that have more to say about the seers than those who are being seen – that respond “more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object” . Thus, as in Orientalism, in Brazil’s official discourse on Africa the latter does not always figure as an actual, coeval, heterogeneous continent; much too frequently, it is an imagined Africa, homogeneous and frozen in time somewhere between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries – when the last wave of African slaves arrived in Brazil. But differently from Said’s original notion, this imagination stems not from the imperial impetus of Western powers, but from ideologies supporting the construction of Brazil as a nation, and more specifically, the place of Africans in it. Here, the African appears less as an ambivalent other or as a clearly distinct part of the self than as part of a hybrid self that is distinguishable through dimensions like arts, music, bodily techniques, food, language – in one word, culture. Here I will refer to this modulation of Orientalist discourse as nation-building Orientalism. Nation-building has been a more commonly deployed term to describe the historical process that I am otherwise referring to here, following subaltern studies and Latin American postcolonial scholars, as internal colonialism . This terminological option conveys more clearly what is for me the key contrast vis-à-vis Said’s account of Orientalism: the empire-building character of British, French and U.S. discourse on the Orient. Other than that, the discursive mechanics follows similar lines, and the nation-building version of Orientalism may be even thought of as a historical outgrowth of it. Said himself had suggested as much when he envisaged the potential of this kind of discourse to travel beyond hegemonic centers and be appropriated by the subaltern: in Orientalism, he had wished to call the attention of “formerly colonized peoples” to “the dangers and temptations of employing this structure [Orientalism] upon themselves or upon others” .

This is precisely what Brazil and other post-colonial nation-states have done, in relation to subaltern groups such as Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples . But as our discussion of Freyre has shown, the addressee of nation-building discourse is not limited to those who are being internally colonized. This inward coloniality implicates an outward one, directed to hegemonic centers in relation to which post-colonial nations see themselves as subaltern, and from which they seek recognition. To become a donor is, as I have suggested in Chapter 1, one of the ways in which this pursuit of recognition has been currently carried out by Brazilian diplomats.Much of the mismatches and contradictions pointed out in this chapter, both historically and contemporarily, have to do with the notion of culture implicit in Brazil’s nation-building Orientalism. The culture Africans are assumed to share with Brazilians has an essence, is bounded, and has changed very little throughout the centuries; it has an ontological quality that is conducted through specific material and ideational channels , being therefore separable from other domains like politics, the economy, and so forth. Although anthropologists have helped create it, this is a notion of culture that most of them have abandoned by now. Norbert Elias’s classic historical discussion of the emergence of the German Kultur in opposition to the French and English civilization or civilisation had already pointed to how culture has always been, from its modern beginnings, fundamentally political: a productive notion in certain historical formations attending to situated political stakes; in short, a cultural politics. The foregrounding of presumed affinities in the domain of culture prevalent in Brazil’s views on Africa may seem to fall in line with academic arguments stressing the centrality of nontextual forms of “embodied subjectivity” in Africa’s trans-Atlantic diaspora, in prominent works such as Gilroy’s Black Atlantic .But from the point of view of this dissertation, what it indicates most forcefully is the peripheralization of both regions during the rise to hegemony of the West, and its dominance in other dimensions such as economy, political institutions, and knowledge. Thus, what would be the proper terrain for relations across the Southern Atlantic was eventually left to what is understood, according to Western modernity’s normativity, to belong to the domain of culture . This is also linked to the fact that, to a large extent, it is in this dimension that African-Brazilians have most often excelled in Brazil. Both fieldwork and the historical literature show that Brazilian diplomats, government officials, businessmen, or technical professionals were and are mostly fair-skinned; most black Brazilians involved in cooperation with Africa, on the other hand, have been “cultural” agents such as athletes, musicians, or actors. In other words, internal coloniality has largely reproduced its external counterpart, which relegated Africa itself to the most peripheral end of the world system . One of my suggestions therefore is that the insistence in bringing culture to the fore of Brazil-Africa relations is an outwards projection of an unresolved internal problem of how to deal with Brazil’s domestic race relations – what I wished to indicate here through the notion of nation-building Orientalism. In this sense, the problem is not that questions of race and culture have been misplaced or misconceived in Brazil’s diplomatic discourse on Africa; it is, rather, that these should not have been there at all, at least not at forefront position they have occupied throughout the decades. In this sense, assertions that domestic race-based movements would be an “internal arm” of Brazil’s Africa policy , or that quilombola communities and other African-Brazilian groups should mediate South-South cooperation efforts , may make little practical sense, especially in technical fields like agriculture.