Essay
The Masters and the Slaves
Casa-grande & senzala
Gilberto Freyre · 1933
Synopsis
The essay studies the formation of Brazilian society from the colonial sugar plantation, the master's house and the slave quarters. It links slavery, miscegenation and the patriarchal order to sugar monoculture, and takes as its materials sexuality, domestic life, cooking, clothing, religion, dance and disease. It argues that the country fused Portuguese, African and Amerindian contributions into a mixed and original society.
Context
The book appeared in 1933, the first part of a trilogy on Brazilian patriarchal society. According to the review in the American Journal of Sociology, it was an immediate success in Brazil; its author draws on travellers' accounts, newspaper advertisements, archives and family memories, in an ample prose laden with notes. In the 1930s and 1940s it passed for a positive image of the country, breaking with the racism of earlier authors. It was later reproached for having painted slavery as a gentle servitude and for establishing the myth of racial democracy, an expression that Toda Matéria says is absent from his writings.
Who it is for
A large, learned and digressive book, with abundant notes; the French translation by Roger Bastide, with a preface by Lucien Febvre, dates from 1952.
Prizes and reception
An immediate success on publication, translated into English as early as 1946, then alternately praised and contested for its image of racial mixing.
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