Gilberto Freyre and the Twentieth-Century Rethinking of Race in Latin America

This article examines the intellectual origins and meaning of Gilberto Freyre's Casa-grande. It argues that Freyre's attack on a racial hierarchy of cultural value, and on ideas of racial purity, may be understood from four perspectives: first, as part of a long tradition of pan-American response to the Old World's contempt for the New; second, as a claim for his region, the Northeast of Brazil, the most Africanised part of his country, of a central role in its nation's civilization; third, as part of a broader Latin American renegotiation of the place of the indigenous and African culture in the decades after the First World War; and, lastly, as a classic modernist attempt to frame a view of universal humanity.