Gilberto Freyre’s Tropical China

• In Event: Chinese and Brazilian Diasporic Cultural Convergences

Abstract

Sociologist Gilberto Freyre is well known for his controversial writings that claim Brazilian society to be composed of the racially harmonious mixture of black, indigenous and European people. Scholars have contested these claims for obscuring the violence of colonial intimacies and systemic marginalization of indigenous people and Afro-Brazilians. In addition, Freyre’s formulation does not include the diversity of people and cultures from non-European nations who have resided in Brazil for centuries. Rather, his essays about China that question how Brazil might be conceived of as a tropical China intertwine the rhetoric of multiculturalism with xenophobic and exclusionary language. In doing so, he performs a linguistic gesture that masks itself as multicultural inclusion, but in actuality, his writings transfer the rhetoric of sexuality and race that uphold his myth of harmonious miscegenation into terminology related to culture and ethnicity in order to produce the fantasy of nationalist unity in transnational form.

Author

• Ana Paulina Lee, Columbia University