Entrevista com Luiz Felipe de Alencastro.

Portuguese enclaves in Brazil and Angola maintained bilateral trade and cultural exchanges from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. While in Brazil the growth of the mulatto population appears as a key feature of Luso-Brazilian colonialism, and Afro-Brazilians have come to constitute the majority of the current Brazilian population, mulattos never exceeded 2 per cent of the Angolan population prior to the 1970s. And yet Luso-Brazilian miscegenation eventually became the bedrock of ‘lusotropicalism’, an essential component of Portugal's (...) colonial ideology in the second half of the twentieth century. To understand these paradoxes, beyond the demographic figures, this chapter examines the historical processes concerning mulattos as a group on both sides of the South Atlantic. Among its conclusions is that miscegenation is a necessary but insufficient condition for the growth of a mulatto population. (shrink)

Milton Ohata reviews Luiz Felipe de Alencastro’s O trato dos viventes: Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul [Mortal Traffic: The Formation of Brazil in the South Atlantic]. O trato dos viventes begins from a simple but consequential premise: that in the history of Portuguese America, the whole is not the sum of its parts; that is, it cannot be understood by merely combining the histories of its various regimes. Rather, local history is to be interpreted in the light of (...) its effective connections, in reciprocal determination, with the history of capitalism — in which the slave trade played an indispensible part. (shrink)