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Lusotropicalism ( pt, Lusotropicalismo) is a term and "quasi-theory" developed by Brazilian sociologist
Gilberto Freyre Gilberto de Mello Freyre (March 15, 1900 – July 18, 1987) was a Brazilian sociologist, anthropologist, historian, writer, painter, journalist, congressman born in Recife, Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil. He is commonly associated with other m ...
to describe the distinctive character of Portuguese imperialism overseas, proposing that the Portuguese were better
colonizer Colonization, or colonisation, constitutes large-scale population movements wherein migrants maintain strong links with their, or their ancestors', former country – by such links, gain advantage over other inhabitants of the territory. When ...
s than other European nations.
Miguel Vale de Almeida Miguel Vale de Almeida (born August 21, 1960 in Lisbon, Portugal) is a Portuguese, anthropologist, LGBT activist, and professor at the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE) in Lisbon. He is the current editor-in-chief ...

Portugal’s Colonial Complex: From Colonial Lusotropicalism to Postcolonial Lusophony
/ref> Freyre theorized that because of Portugal's warmer climate, and having been inhabited by
Celts The Celts (, see pronunciation for different usages) or Celtic peoples () are. "CELTS location: Greater Europe time period: Second millennium B.C.E. to present ancestry: Celtic a collection of Indo-European peoples. "The Celts, an ancient ...
,
Romans Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD * Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a let ...
,
Visigoths The Visigoths (; la, Visigothi, Wisigothi, Vesi, Visi, Wesi, Wisi) were an early Germanic people who, along with the Ostrogoths, constituted the two major political entities of the Goths within the Roman Empire in late antiquity, or what is kno ...
, Moors and several other peoples in pre-modern times, the Portuguese were more humane, friendly, and adaptable to other climates and cultures. He saw "Portuguese-based cultures as cultures of ecumenical expansion" and suggested that "Lusotropical culture was a form of resistance against both the 'barbaric' Soviet communist influence, and the also 'barbarian' process of Americanization and capitalist expansion." In addition, by the early 20th century, Portugal was by far the European colonial power with the oldest territorial presence overseas; in some cases its territories had been continuously settled and ruled by the Portuguese for five centuries. Lusotropicalism celebrated both actual and mythological elements of
racial democracy Racial democracy ( pt, Democracia racial) is a term used by some to describe race relations in Brazil. The term denotes some scholars' belief that Brazil has escaped racism and racial discrimination. Those researchers contend that Brazilians d ...
and
civilizing mission The civilizing mission ( es, misión civilizadora; pt, Missão civilizadora; french: Mission civilisatrice) is a political rationale for military intervention and for colonization purporting to facilitate the Westernization of indigenous pe ...
in the
Portuguese Empire The Portuguese Empire ( pt, Império Português), also known as the Portuguese Overseas (''Ultramar Português'') or the Portuguese Colonial Empire (''Império Colonial Português''), was composed of the overseas colonies, factories, and the ...
, encompassing a pro-
miscegenation Miscegenation ( ) is the interbreeding of people who are considered to be members of different races. The word, now usually considered pejorative, is derived from a combination of the Latin terms ''miscere'' ("to mix") and ''genus'' ("race") ...
attitude toward the colonies or overseas territories. The ideology is best exemplified in the work of Freyre.


Background

The beginning of the
Portuguese Empire The Portuguese Empire ( pt, Império Português), also known as the Portuguese Overseas (''Ultramar Português'') or the Portuguese Colonial Empire (''Império Colonial Português''), was composed of the overseas colonies, factories, and the ...
is usually traced to the 1415
Conquest of Ceuta The conquest of Ceuta by the Portuguese on 21 August 1415 marks an important step in the beginning of the Portuguese Empire in Africa. History In 711, shortly after the Arab conquest of North Africa, the city of Ceuta was used as a stag ...
in North Africa. In the succeeding decades of the 15th century, Portuguese sailors traveled all over the world:
Bartolomeu Dias Bartolomeu Dias ( 1450 – 29 May 1500) was a Portuguese mariner and explorer. In 1488, he became the first European navigator to round the southern tip of Africa and to demonstrate that the most effective southward route for ships lay in the o ...
rounded the
Cape of Good Hope The Cape of Good Hope ( af, Kaap die Goeie Hoop ) ;''Kaap'' in isolation: pt, Cabo da Boa Esperança is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. A common misconception is that the Cape of Good Hope is t ...
in 1488; Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498; and
Pedro Álvares Cabral Pedro Álvares Cabral ( or ; born Pedro Álvares de Gouveia; c. 1467 or 1468 – c. 1520) was a Portuguese nobleman, military commander, navigator and explorer regarded as the European discoverer of Brazil. He was the first human i ...
made landfall in Brazil in 1500. At first the Portuguese were interested primarily in lucrative trade opportunities (including the slave trade), and by the end of the 16th century the Portuguese had established trading outposts in Africa, India, Brazil, the Middle East, and South Asia. During this time there was some minimal Portuguese intermarrying with and settlement among African and Asian peoples. It was much more common for the Portuguese to bring Asian and especially African peoples to Europe and Brazil, most often though not always as enslaved people. As early as the 1570s, Lisbon had a sizeable and well-known Black African population of enslaved and free people. During the New Imperialist Scramble for Africa of the 1890s onward, Portugal expanded its coastal African territories in modern
Angola , national_anthem = " Angola Avante"() , image_map = , map_caption = , capital = Luanda , religion = , religion_year = 2020 , religion_ref = , coordina ...
, Mozambique, and
Guinea-Bissau Guinea-Bissau ( ; pt, Guiné-Bissau; ff, italic=no, 𞤘𞤭𞤲𞤫 𞤄𞤭𞤧𞤢𞥄𞤱𞤮, Gine-Bisaawo, script=Adlm; Mandinka: ''Gine-Bisawo''), officially the Republic of Guinea-Bissau ( pt, República da Guiné-Bissau, links=no ) ...
inland. Like other European colonial empires, Portugal achieved this expansion primarily through physical and economic violence against native peoples. After the 1910 Portuguese Revolution, and as an official policy of the 1933–1974 '' Estado Novo'' dictatorship, Black people in Portuguese Africa were '' de jure'' eligible for full
Portuguese citizenship Portuguese nationality law details the conditions by which a person is a national of Portugal. The primary law governing nationality regulations is the Nationality Act, which came into force on 3 October 1981. Portugal is a member state of th ...
and its attendant rights. In practice, Black people hardly ever achieved such status, and during the ''Estado Novo'' even white Portuguese born in Africa were denied the same legal rights and protections as whites born in
metropolitan Metropolitan may refer to: * Metropolitan area, a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories * Metropolitan borough, a form of local government district in England * Metropolitan county, a typ ...
Portugal.


Application during the ''Estado Novo''

Prior to Freyre's publication of ''Casa-Grande & Senzala'', few—if any—Portuguese politicians and colonial administrators conceived of the Portuguese Empire as a multicultural, multiracial, and pluricontinental nation. They were more likely to think of Portuguese colonialism as a logical historical extension or continuation of the '' Reconquista''. For example, Armindo Monteiro, Portuguese Minister of Colonies between 1931 and 1935, considered himself a "
Social Darwinist Social Darwinism refers to various theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics, and which were largely defined by scholars in We ...
" and was a proponent of the traditional colonial "
civilizing mission The civilizing mission ( es, misión civilizadora; pt, Missão civilizadora; french: Mission civilisatrice) is a political rationale for military intervention and for colonization purporting to facilitate the Westernization of indigenous pe ...
" and
white savior The term white savior is a critical description of a white person who is depicted as liberating, rescuing or uplifting non-white people; it is critical in the sense that it describes a pattern in which people of color in economically under-devel ...
ism. Monteiro believed Portugal had a "historic obligation" to civilize the "inferior races" who lived in its African and Asian territories by converting them to Christianity and teaching them a work ethic. Portuguese dictator
António de Oliveira Salazar António de Oliveira Salazar (, , ; 28 April 1889 – 27 July 1970) was a Portuguese dictator who served as President of the Council of Ministers from 1932 to 1968. Having come to power under the ("National Dictatorship"), he reframed the re ...
strongly resisted Freyre's ideas throughout the 1930s and 1940s, partly because Freyre claimed the Portuguese were more prone to
miscegenation Miscegenation ( ) is the interbreeding of people who are considered to be members of different races. The word, now usually considered pejorative, is derived from a combination of the Latin terms ''miscere'' ("to mix") and ''genus'' ("race") ...
than other European nations. He adopted Lusotropicalism only after sponsoring Freyre on a visit to Portugal and some of its overseas territories in 1951 and 1952. Freyre's work ''Aventura e Rotina'' (''Adventure and Routine'') was a result of this trip. Salazar adopted Lusotropicalism by asserting that since Portugal had been a multicultural, multiracial, and pluricontinental nation since the 15th century, losing its overseas territories in Africa and Asia would dismember the country and end Portuguese independence. According to Salazar, in geopolitical terms, losing these territories would decrease the Portuguese state's self-sufficiency.


Critique


Freyre's response to criticism

The life of Freyre, after he published ''Casa-Grande & Senzala'', became an eternal source of explanation. He repeated several times that he did not create the myth of a
racial democracy Racial democracy ( pt, Democracia racial) is a term used by some to describe race relations in Brazil. The term denotes some scholars' belief that Brazil has escaped racism and racial discrimination. Those researchers contend that Brazilians d ...
and that the fact that his books recognized the intense mixing between "races" in Brazil did not mean a lack of prejudice or discrimination. He pointed out that many people have claimed the United States to have been an "exemplary democracy" whereas slavery and racial segregation were present throughout most of US history: "The interpretation of those who want to place me among the sociologists or anthropologists who said prejudice of race among the Portuguese or the Brazilians never existed is extreme. What I have always suggested is that such prejudice is minimal... when compared to that which is still in place elsewhere, where laws still regulate relations between Europeans and other groups". "It is not that racial prejudice or social prejudice related to complexion are absent in Brazil. They exist. But no one here would have thought of "white-only" Churches. No one in Brazil would have thought of laws against interracial marriage ... Fraternal spirit is stronger among Brazilians than racial prejudice, colour, class or religion. It is true that equality has not been reached since the end of slavery.... There was racial prejudice among plantation owners, there was social distance between the masters and the slaves, between whites and blacks.... But few wealthy Brazilians were as concerned with racial purity as the majority were in the Old South".


See also

* Eurasianism *
Lusosphere Lusophones ( pt, Lusófonos) are peoples that speak Portuguese as a native or as common second language and nations where Portuguese features prominently in society. Comprising an estimated 270 million people spread across 10 sovereign countries ...
*
Overseas province Overseas province ( pt, província ultramarina) was a designation used by Portugal for its overseas possessions, located outside Europe. History In the early the 19th century, Portuguese overseas territories were referred to as "overseas domini ...
*
Pluricontinentalism Pluricontinentalism ( pt, Pluricontinentalismo) was a geopolitical concept, positing that Portugal was a transcontinental country and a unitary nation-state consisting of continental Portugal and its overseas provinces. With origins as early as ...
*
Racial democracy Racial democracy ( pt, Democracia racial) is a term used by some to describe race relations in Brazil. The term denotes some scholars' belief that Brazil has escaped racism and racial discrimination. Those researchers contend that Brazilians d ...
*
Luso-Africans Luso-Africans are people of mixed Portuguese and African ancestry who speak Portuguese. The vast majority of Luso-Africans live in former Portuguese Africa, now referred to as '' Lusophone Africa'', comprising the modern countries of Angola, Guin ...
**''
Assimilados Assimilado is the term given to African subjects of the colonizing Portuguese Empire from the 1910s to the 1960s, who had reached a level of "civilization", according to Portuguese legal standards, that theoretically qualified them for full right ...
'' **''
Prazeros The Prazeiros were the Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese landowners who ruled, in a feudal-like manner, vast estates called '' prazos'' that were leased to them by the Portuguese Crown, in the Zambezi Valley from the sixteenth through to the eighteent ...
'' **''
Lançados The ''lançados'' (literally, ''the thrown out ones'' Pardue 2015: p. 42 or ''the cast out ones'') were settlers and adventurers of Portuguese origin in Senegambia, Cabo Verde, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and other areas on the coast of West Africa. Ma ...
'' ** Mestiços **''
Órfãs do Rei The Órfãs do Rei (, ''orphans of the king'') were Portuguese girl orphans who were sent from Portugal to overseas colonies during the Portuguese Empire as part of Portugal's colonization efforts. The orphans were married to native rulers or Portu ...
'' * Tropicalismo


References


Further reading

* Castelo, Cláudia, ''O Modo Português de estar no Mundo' O luso-tropicalismo e a ideologia colonial portuguesa (1933–1961)''. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1999. * Cahen, Michel, "'Portugal is in the Sky': Conceptual Considerations on Communities, Lusitanity and Lusophony", in E.Morier-Genoud & M.Cahen (eds), ''Imperial Migrations. Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World'', London: Palgrave, 2012. * Nery da Fonseca, Edson. ''Em Torno de Gilberto Freyre''. Recife: Editora Massangana, 2007. * Nery da Fonseca, Edson. ''Gilberto Freyre de A a Z – Referências essenciais à sua vida e obra''. Rio de Janeiro: Zé mario Editor, 2002. * Ribeiro, Ana Beatriz. ''Modernization Dreams, Lusotropical Promises: A Global Studies Perspective on Brazil-Mozambique Development Discourse'' (Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 23). Leiden: Brill, 2020. * Vakil, Abdoolkarim, "'Mundo Pretuguês': Colonial and Postcolonial Diasporic Dis/articulations", in E.Morier-Genoud & M.Cahen (eds), ''Imperial Migrations. Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World'', London: Palgrave, 2012. * Villon, Victor. ''O Mundo Português que Gilberto Freyre Criou – seguido de Diálogos com Edson Nery da Fonseca''. Rio de Janeiro, Vermelho Marinho, 2010. {{Authority control 20th century in Portugal Portuguese Empire Portuguese culture Multiracial affairs in Brazil