A classic of Brazilian literary criticism and historiography, Brazil and the Dialectic of Colonization explores the unique character of Brazil from its colonial beginnings to its emergence as a modern nation. This translation presents the thought of Alfredo Bosi, one of contemporary Brazil's leading intellectuals, to an English-speaking audience.

Portugal extracted wealth from its Brazilian colony. Slaves—first indigenous peoples, later Africans—mined its ore and cut its sugarcane. From the customs of the colonists and the aspirations of the enslaved rose Brazil. Bosi scrutinizes signal points in the creation of Brazilian culture—the plays and poetry, the sermons of missionaries and Jesuit priests, the Indian novels of José de Alencar and the Voices of Africa of poet Castro Alves. His portrait of the country's response to the pressures of colonial conformity offers a groundbreaking appraisal of Brazilian culture as it emerged from the tensions between imposed colonial control and the African and Amerindian cults—including the Catholic-influenced ones—that resisted it.

| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Author's Note to the North American Edition 1. Colony, Cult, and Culture 2. Anchieta, or the Crossed Arrows of the Sacred 3. From Our Former State to the Mercantile Machine 4. Vieira, or the Cross of Inequality 5. Antonil, or the Tears of Trade Goods 6. A Sacrificial Myth: Alencar's Indianism 7. Slavery between Two Liberalisms 8. Under the Sign of Ham 9. The Archeology of the Welfare State: On the Persistence of Long-Held Ideas 10. Brazilian Culture and Brazilian Cultures Postscript to "Brazilian Culture and Brazilian Cultures" (1992) A Retrospective Glance Epilogue (2001) Notes Index | Ranging widely from elite literary texts and baroque sculpture to 'archaic' Catholic folk images and positivist reveries, it offers a dazzling exegesis of language, metaphor, and allegory while connecting past and present as a spiral through time within the Luso-Brazilian colonial space. . . . A must-read tour de force."
—John D. French, author of Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture

"The dialectical processes Bosi describes help one understand both the context and contours of the passage from premodern to modern—mechanisms that remain operative in countries that, like Brazil, experienced and extended colonial period of development. Recommended."—Choice
"The Dialectic of Colonization, published in Portuguese in 1992, is Bosi's most influential work, evoking for a millennial public iconic forms of brasilidade such as corporatism, cordiality, and evolutionary radicalism." —Ethos and Pathos in Millennial Brazil

|Alfredo Bosi is the director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of São Paolo. He is the author of A Concise History of Brazilian Literature. Robert Patrick Newcomb is an associate professor of Luso-Brazilian studies at the University of California-Davis.