Lusotropical Romance: Camões, Gilberto Freyre, and the Isle of Love

Abstract

Abstract: Gilberto Freyre’s doctrine of Lusotropicalism, arguably the most influential of twentieth-century discourses legitimizing the survival of the Portuguese empire, was rooted to a significant degree in a foundational fantasy of erotic encounter between white explorers and Asian or African women. In this fantasy, regularly reiterated in Freyre’s writings, the figure of Camões came to play an increasingly prominent role. The “Isle of Love” episode of The Lusiads may be read as an implicit antecedent of Freyre’s insistence on amorous underpinnings of the Lusotropical continuum. The narrative sequence of cantos nine and ten, in which sexual coupling between Gama’s sailors and the nymphs inhabiting the island is followed by a collective marriage ceremony (and culminates in a prophecy of Portuguese imperial greatness) is shown to reverberate in the unresolved contradiction of Freyre’s argument, with its simultaneous endorsement of the colonial contract viewed as a monogamous conjugal union and as polygamous multiplication of procreative opportunity.