Um projeto panlusitano no Atlântico Sul : as relações luso-afro-brasileiras nos anos de 1930

Abstract

Luso-Afro-Brazilian relations were built throughout the 1930s based on various tensions and in a context of strong disputes over the notion of race, miscegenation and nation. The intellectuals of the Bulletin of the Luso-African Society of Rio de Janeiro, the subject of this work, were a kind of mediators of the Atlantic debates, on their various margins, which the various modernisms saw as constituting, especially the repositioning of the figure of the mestizo and the African legacy as a positive vector for the so-called pan-Lusitanian nationalities (whether they were former colonies, colonies or the Lusitanian metropolis itself). This conception of race and colonialism itself outlined by these republican Portuguese intellectuals exiled in Brazil (in dialogue with figures such as Gilberto Freyre, Arthur Ramos, Édison Carneiro in Brazil and the Cape Verdeans of Claridade) was something sui generis in the face of the hegemony of social Darwinism in the centralist colonial management of the Portuguese Luso-African imperial state. In a certain way, these intellectuals anticipated, at an intellectual level, the reformist assumptions of colonial management and the Luso-tropical ideology that would be central to post-war colonialism. However, this heterodoxy of these anti-Salazarist intellectuals and in favor of the discourse of miscegenation was not displaced from a racist ideology in the culturalist sphere (the “evolution towards civilization”) that this reformist strand of Portuguese colonialism in exile represented. This story, full of tensions and contradictions, is a sample of the immense wealth of intellectual exchanges that were being outlined throughout the Atlantic, not only those that were officially taking place between States, but also on the shores of the Atlantic.