Iberism and Lusotropicalism in the work of Gilberto Freyre

Abstract

This article discusses the Luso-Tropicalism trend, a subject that moved the thought Gilberto Freyre from the 1940s to the 1960s. The prolifical intellectual production of Prof. Freyre – marked by an approximation with the dictatorship of António Salazar and with the Portuguese effort to maintain colonies in Africa – can only be understood on the basis of a criticism of Western modernity, which Freyre had absorbed from the Spanish thought of the final decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Authors such as Miguel de Unamuno, Ángel Ganivet and José Ortega y Gasset reflected on the particularities of Iberian Culture, perceived as basically different from the modern Anglo-Saxon culture. The Iberians, for Gilberto Freyre, and the Portuguese in particular, were capable of understanding the tropics and their people, and were able to live and experience miscigenation and compromise with them. Such an understanding led him to defend, at least in his more ideological moments, as well as to justify Portuguese colonialism, despite the winds of change blowing in favor of decolonization after the end of the Second Word War.