Editorial Note

Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez

This issue goes to press as we approach the one-year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. With so much happening during this past year, I am proud that we have been able to get issues of the Luso-Brazilian Review in print with very little delay. My heartfelt thanks to my co-editors and all the staff at the LBR office.

I am delighted to announce that the Luso-Brazilian Review has welcomed onboard two new editors in the areas of History and Social Sciences: Jerry Dávila and Marc Hertzman, both from the Department of History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Jerry Dávila holds the Jorge Paulo Lemann Chair in Brazilian History. His research focuses on public policy in Brazil, especially in relation to racial thought. He is also interested in the state and social movements of the twentieth century. His work has been fielddefining, with monographs such as Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil (1917–1945), published in 2003, and Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, from 2010, both with Duke University Press. Among the many hats that he wears, Jerry is currently the Executive Director of the Illinois Global Institute. Marc Hertzman is a specialist on the history of Brazil and Latin America with a special interest in culture, music, race, slavery, and class. His first book, Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil (2013 with Duke University Press) boldly redefined the history of samba by revisiting popular myths about the quintessential Brazilian musical genre. He is currently working on a monograph on the history and afterlives of Palmares and its iconic leader, Zumbi. Drawing on a breadth of archival documents, he is looking in particular at how this story of slavery, land, violence, and Zumbi’s death has been articulated over the centuries. I want to express a warm welcome to our new editors as we are very excited to work with Marc and Jerry.

We are deeply honored to open the present issue with an article by Carlos Reis of the University of Coimbra and longtime collaborator of the LBR, having served on the Advisory Board for over 15 years and a regular evaluator of manuscripts in his areas of expertise. The present article, “O conhecimento narrativo como mediação do saber,” stems from the presentation delivered at the ceremonial opening of the academic year at the University of Coimbra on October 14, 2020, in the Sala Grande dos Atos—the Ceremonial Hall where some of the university’s most important ceremonies are held. This majestic discourse takes the reader through an interdisciplinary approach to narrative as the author discusses, through an array of examples, the explicit and sometimes masked “narrative turn” in fields as diverse as Medical Sciences, Law, and Economics.

The next two articles analyze works by the two great masters of the Portuguese-speaking nineteenth century, Eça de Queirós and Machado de Assis. In “Eça, Machado, e o diálogo transatlântico sobre a amizade masculina,” David J. Bailey provides an insightful reading of masculine friendship in several works by these authors, the implications of this theme in the narrative and composition of these texts, along with what it reveals in terms of this historical moment in Portugal and Brazil. Next, in “Vulnerability, Resistance, and the Street in the Work of Machado de Assis,” Rex P. Nielson reads scenes from several of Machado de Assis’s short stories and the novels Quincas Borba (1891) and Esaú e Jacó (1904) to discuss differentiated conditions of vulnerability. His work is guided by the theories of Judith Butler, Roberto DaMatta, and Sandra Graham, as he works with this concept in relation to defensive subjects within the binary home/street and suggests that Machado’s work provides situations that counter vulnerability.

The following article is by Jeroen Dewulf, “How Brazilian are Quicumbis?: On Mestiçagem and ‘African Indians’ in Brazilian Popular Culture,” and offers an exciting new interpretation of quicumbis. Engaging with previous scholarship that has viewed the quicumbi as a performance shaped by Indigenous traditions, Dewulf’s reassessment questions the extent of this mestiçagem, and suggests a stronger African legacy. Next, Gunter Axt’s article “Depois da Revolução Federalista. Militares, milicianos, combate ao contrabando e o governo do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul na passagem do século XIX para o XX,” evaluates how the Republican Party and the state government from that region reacted to the pacification of the 1895 Federalist Revolution. In particular, through the experience of Colonel João Francisco Pereira de Souza, this study discusses the Party’s involvement with the Brazilian Army, milicianos along the Uruguayan border, the treatment of those who opposed the amnesty, and the ever-thrilling topic of border smuggling.

The last three articles take the reader to the Northeastern region of Brazil and then re-readings of Gilberto Freyre’s Lusotropicalism. In “Back to the Sertão: Ronaldo Correia de Brito’s Galileia and the Brazilian Regionalist Tradition,” Ashley Brock explores the concepts of belonging, the heritage of the sertão, and ‘at-homeness’ (Heidegger) through Critical Regionalism, to discuss Brito’s novel in relation to the literary inheritance of João Guimarães Rosa, local folklore, and a rewriting of the past. The next article, “Da concepção imperial de Gilberto Freyre,” by Luiz Feldman, proposes a reading of Gilberto Freyre’s lusotropicalism as part of the sociologist’s vision of an imperial federation that would include Portuguese colonies in the Atlantic, Africa, and Asia. His thesis is based on an analysis of Gilberto Freyre’s lusotropicalist texts from 1937 to 1962, working through four different topics that Freyre discusses: the reorganization of the British Empire as a multicultural, intercontinental federation; the implementation in all oversea dominions of the thesis outlined in Casa grande & senzala on the adaptability of the Portuguese colonizers; the decadence of Portugal as a consequence of having adopted a form of ethnocentric imperialism; and lastly, the proposal of a federative empire between Portugal and Brazil with jurisdiction over the other overseas territories. Our issue closes with “Ida e volta: ‘Quase Brasil,’ ‘quase político’ and the Inherent Vice of Freyre’s Lusotropicalist Framing,” by Rui Gonçalves Miranda that dialogues with Luiz Feldman’s study. Miranda explores the stylistic devices such as metaphors, similes, and morpholinguistic tropes present in Freyre’s Aventura e rotina and Um brasileiro em terras portuguesas, both of 1953, to emphasize the political dimension of the author’s lusotropicalist vision.

As with each issue, I am very grateful for our Luso-Brazilian community of scholars who volunteer their time and expertise to evaluate manuscripts for the journal. Thank you for keeping the peer review process moving forward in these trying times. In this issue, there are only a handful of book reviews. Over the next few issues of the journal, we hope to have more books out to reviewers to catch up with those monographs that have been published recently.