Luso-Tropicalism and Its Discontents

<p> Modern perceptions of race across much of the Global South are indebted to the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre who in works such as <em>The Masters and the Slaves</em> claimed that Portuguese colonialism produced exceptionally benign and tolerant race relations. This volume radically reinterprets Freyre's Luso-tropicalist arguments and critically engages with the historical complexity of racial concepts and practices in the Portuguese-speaking world. Encompassing Brazil as well as Portuguese-speaking societies in Africa Asia and even Portugal itself it places an interdisciplinary group of scholars in conversation to challenge the conventional understanding of twentieth-century racialization proffering new insights into such controversial topics as human plasticity racial amalgamation and the tropes and proxies of whiteness.</p>