Portuguese sea: colonial expansion and ideology (readings attached)
Write a short, 1-2 page (or 4-6 paragraph) essay for each question you choose. You should use the questions in bullet points as orientation on how to structure your answer.
Question 1:
Bust no more about the subtle Greek / Or the long odyssey of Trojan Aeneas; / Enough of the oriental conquests / Of great Alexander and of Trajan; / I sing of the famous Portuguese / To whom both Mars and Neptune bowed. / Abandon all the ancient Muse revered, / A loftier code of honour has appeared.
(Luis de Cames, The Lusiads, I, 3)
How does Cames characterize his poem in this quotation?
What does he mean by a loftier code of honour, and in relation to which previous one?
And how do these verses fit into The Lusiads
Question 2:
As to their miscibility, no colonizing people in modern times has exceeded or so much as equated the Portuguese in this regard. From their first contact with women of color, they mingled with them and procreated mestizo sons; and the result was that a few thousand daring males succeeded in establishing themselves firmly in possession of a vast territory and were able to compete with great and numerous peoples in the extension of their colonial domain and in the efficiency of their colonizing activity. Miscibility rather than mobility was the process by which the Portuguese made up for their deficiency in human mass or volume in the large-scale colonization of extensive areas. For this they had been prepared by the intimate terms of social and sexual intercourse on which they had lived with the colored races that had invaded their peninsula or were close neighbors to it, one of which, of the Mohammedan faith, was technically more highly skilled and possessed an intellectual and artistic culture superior to that of the blond Christians.
(Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 1933)
What does Freyre mean by “miscibility”?
What do you think of this idea and why may it be problematic as well as productive in thinking about the making of Brazilian society?
How does this passage relate to the argument of The Masters and the Slaves more generally, and in what ways could it have buttressed ideological justifications for Portuguese colonialism?
