Love Is All You Need

Abstract

The vexed subject of specifically Lusophone postcoloniality has been addressed in recent years in a growing number of studies, in many cases stimulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s influential essay “Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Inter-Identity” (2002) and correspondingly attuned, in particular, to the role played by Portugal and the Portuguese in the colonial and postcolonial equation, in keeping with Santos’s “central hypothesis” (as expressed in Luís Madureirâs critique) that “the difference of Portuguese colonialism must reproduce itself in the difference of postcolonialism in the Portuguese-speaking world” (Madureira 2008, 135–36).¹ At the same time, a comprehensive and multifaceted project of reappraising the writings and the legacy of Gilberto Freyre— described by Christopher Dunn as “a retomada freyreana” (the return to Freyre)— has been under way in Brazil and among the worldwide community of Brazilianist scholars (Dunn 2006).2 Relatively few points of genuine intellectual contact may be identified between these two parallel enterprises of epistemological reassessment and reconstruction, as the “neo-Freyrean” (Dunn 2006, 42) discourse in Brazil has tended to focus on largely self-involved negotiations of Brazilian social and cultural identity, while the attribution of an indisputably prominent space in the debates on Portuguese postcolonialism to Freyre’s concept of “Lusotropicalism” has not, by and large, relied on an in-depth reappraisal of his original writings on this subject.