Gilberto Freyre was arguably the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Latin America.
He was active as a sociologist a historian a journalist a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly
a novelist poet and artist. He was a cultural critic with a good deal to say about
architecture past and present and a public intellectual whose pronouncements on race region
and empire - not to mention sex - made him famous in some quarters and notorious in others. The
Masters and the Slaves his most famous work went through forty editions and has been
translated into nine languages made into a comic book and a television miniseries while two
directors (one of them Robert Rossellini) planned to turn it into a film. Yet he is not well
known outside Brazil. Freyre was a major social thinker one of the few who have not come from
Western Europe or the USA and this book argues that we should take account of the pioneering
work of this gifted intellectual. His ideas are of particular relevance today for both
political and academic reasons. His interest in gender ethnicity hybridity identity
globalization and capitalism ensures that his ideas are still provocative and topical and
ready to be introduced to a wider audience.
