Description:
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 miniseries, 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.
Review Quotes: The world's greatest 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 Lúcia 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 Fernández-Armesto, Tufts University)
As expected, the authors have produced a major work of intellectual biography of a most original and influential Latin-American thinker. (José 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 cultural historian of our generation. (Jay Winter, Yale University)
(...) de Burkes hebben met dit boek een fascinerende intellectuele biografie van Gilberto Freyre geschreven, die ook voor de meer algemeen geïnteresseerde lezer meer dan de moeite waard is. (Geert A. Banck, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis)