“Peter Burke is the leading cultural historian of our generation.”?Jay Winter, Yale University
“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 Lucia 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 Fernandez-Armesto
“As expected, the authors have produced a major work of intellectual biography of a most original and influential Latin-American thinker.”?Jose 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
Gilberto Freyre was arguably the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Latin America. He was active as a sociologist, historian, journalist, cultural critic, deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, 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 to the Western world. Freyre was a major social thinker, one of the few who have not come from Western Europe or the United States, and this book argues that we should take account of the pioneering work of this gifted thinker. His ideas are of particular relevance today for both political and academic reasons. His interest in gender, ethnicity, hybridity, identity, globalization, and capitalism ensure that his ideas are still provocative and topical, and ready to be introduced to a wider audience.
Peter Burke is an internationally renowned historian at Cambridge University and has published twenty-five books, including History and Social Theory (Polity) and Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (third edition forthcoming in 2008 for its thirtieth-year anniversary).
Maria Lucia G. Pallares-Burke is former Professor at the University of Sao Paulo and is now a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge.
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
Preface and Acknowledgements
The Importance Of Being Gilberto
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Masters and Slaves
A Public Intellectual
Empire and Republic
The Social Theorist
Gilberto Our Contemporary
Chronology
Notes
Further Reading
Index
