Regarding the
significance of
Gilberto Freyre's 1933
Casa-grande e senzala,
Antonio Candido
referred to it as
nothing less than an "earthquake". From Dubois to Genovese, from Braudel to Barthes, not to mention decades of Brazilian and Lusophone cultural reflection, Freyre's impact has been felt around the globe.
Thomas Skidmore has recently called Freyre's oeuvre a "unique world" that will "take many decades to explore". This volume represents a contribution to that process by offering a set of new critical readings from a range of disciplinary perspectives. These essays show that Freyre is worth considering anew today precisely because of the way in which his legacy serves, often silently, as a foundational presence within so many of the debates that are increasing in both volume and intensity across a number of fields of inquiry.
The interesting project embedded in the realization that seemingly new trends appear throughout Freyre's work is not to simply show how he raised a number of issues precociously. Rather, the crucial task is to ask after the ways in which his work still inhabits our own. In other words, the question is not to ask in which ways we have improved upon Freyre's theses, or transcended his errors; the question is to ask how those "errors" force us to confront our own work in unexpected ways..
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