In this article, I analyze the rhetoric deployed in Casa grande & senzala, without resorting to the dualistic framework in which the work has been studied. I will demonstrate how parts of this essay, very different in their constitutive principles (e.g., nostalgic excerpts, anthropological analysis), are articulated in order to propose a memory pact with the reader. In this pact, the experiences of rural Brazil are remembered lyrically, whereas rural Brazilian racial stereotypes are refuted scientifically. On the one hand, there is an attempt to rescue the affective dimension of patriarchal private life, while on the other hand, the book tries to discard many racial prejudices produced by that same world. Freyre's work sets forth a memory decantation, a subtle dialectics between remembering and forgetting. My argument thereby suggests that memory in Casa-Grande & Senzala must be taken into account as something much more complex than mere nostalgic lamentation. I finally argue that the importance of understanding of this memory pact is twofold: it helps both to identify the constitutive features of racial democracy discourse and to deconstruct that same discourse.
Politics of memory; Slavery and memory; Racial democracy; Gilberto Freyre; Masters and slaves
