Hotel Trópico

In the wake of African decolonization, Brazil attempted to forge connections with newly independent countries. In the early 1960s it launched an effort to establish diplomatic ties with Africa; in the 1970s it undertook trade campaigns to open African markets to Brazilian technology. Hotel TrÓpico reveals the perceptions, particularly regarding race, of the diplomats and intellectuals who traveled to Africa on Brazil’s behalf. Jerry DÁvila analyzes how their actions were shaped by ideas of Brazil as an emerging world power, ready to expand its sphere of influence; of Africa as the natural place to assert that influence, given its historical slave-trade ties to Brazil; and of twentieth-century Brazil as a “racial democracy,” a uniquely harmonious mix of races and cultures. While the experiences of Brazilian policymakers and diplomats in Africa reflected the logic of racial democracy, they also exposed ruptures in this interpretation of Brazilian identity. Did Brazil share a “lusotropical” identity with Portugal and its African colonies, so that it was bound to support Portuguese colonialism at the expense of Brazil’s ties with African nations? Or was Brazil a country of “Africans of every color,” compelled to support decolonization in its role as a natural leader in the South Atlantic? Drawing on interviews with retired Brazilian diplomats and intellectuals, DÁvila shows the Brazilian belief in racial democracy to be about not only race but also Portuguese ethnicity.

Jerry DÁvila is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the author of Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945, also published by Duke University Press.

"Jerry Davila has transformed the history of Brazil's diplomatic initiatives in Africa during the era of decolonization, adding not only depth and fascinating detail to this story, but also showing how the pursuit of a special Brazil-Africa relationship both drew upon Brazil's claims to be a 'racially democratic' nation, and laid bare the contradictions in those claims."--Barbara Weinstein, author of For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 "Hotel Tropico is a superb book. It takes on broad themes such as race and imperialism, modifies much of the current knowledge about Brazil's dictatorship, and suggests a re-evaluation of that form of government in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Hotel Tropico will be read not only by scholars of Brazil and Latin America but also by those studying Africa, empire, and post-colonialism." --Jeffrey Lesser, author of A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960-1980