Nordeste Aspectos da Influencia da Cana sobre a Vida e a Paisagem do Nordeste do Brasil

Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Jose Olympio. Very Good-. 1951. Second Revised Edition. Softcover. 297 pages; 2a edicao, revista e aumentada. Illustracoes de Lula Cardoso Ayres e M. Bandeira. Special limited edition, signed by the author -- copy #24 of 200. Publisher's printed wrappers, fold-over flaps in the French style. Front cover lettered in black and blue-green, spine lettered in black. A clean tight copy, but the spine is toned, and has a short closed tear at the bottom end, and a pull (which has caused a chip missing) at the top. The slipcase is somewhat rubbed and worn at the joints, but is intact and has protected the fragile wrappers nicely. A significant book on his native region of Brazil's northeast, written by Gilberto Freyre [1900-1987] -- sociologist, anthropologist, historian, writer, painter, journalist and politician. Freyre is considered to be the originator of luso-tropicalism -- prompted by the unique mixed racial background of Brazil, and unusual features of Portugal as a colonial power. At its best, luso-tropicalism holds that miscegenation had been a positive force in Brazil. The interpretation concerning Portugal is controversial. Freyre wrote that Portugal's warmer climate, its geographical proximity to Africa, and its long history of having been itself occupied by Romans, Visigoths, Moors, and others -- led to the Portuguese tendency to be more humane, friendly, and adaptable to other climates and cultures. Brazil's Nordeste constitutes a rich subject for a sociologist, with its unique constructions in the old centers of Salvador, Oiunda, and the author's native Recife. The region is a notable hotbed of dance (frevo and maracatu), music (axé and forró) and has evolved a unique cuisine. Nordeste became ground-zero of colonialism, when roughly 1,500 Portuguese arrived on April 22, 1500, under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral at Porto Seguro. Conflicts soon arose because the settlers had displaced the native inhabitants and then tried to enslave them as labor in the lucrative cane fields. The Portuguese colonials then began importing black African slaves to use as manual labor. To this day culture in Northeast Brazil remains fully permeated by this African influence. The city of Salvador, as Brazil’s main sea port, Brazil's center of the African slave trade, a center of the sugar industry, and the seat of the first Catholic bishop of Brazil (in 1552) -- was also the first general seat of government in Brazil. As in many parts of the Americas where African slavery had been imposed, natural resistance developed, but this resistance in Nordeste took an unusual turn which must have been of great interest to a master sociologist; resistance to slavery here led to the formation of "quilombos," or settlements of runaway and free-born African slaves. The Quilombo dos Palmares, the largest and most well-known of these settlements, was founded around 1600 in the Serra da Barriga hills. The unique melting pot of races is Gilberto Freyre's great subject. To quote from his masterwork ['Casa-Grande & Senzala' (usually translated as "The Masters and the Slaves"] -- “Every Brazilian, even the light skinned fair haired one carries about him on his soul, when not on soul and body alike, the shadow or at least the birthmark of the aborigine or the negro, in our affections, our excessive mimicry, our Catholicism which so delights the senses, our music, our gait, our speech, our cradle songs, in everything that is a sincere expression of our lives, we almost all of us bear the mark of that influence.” Freyre's 'Nordeste' was first published in an octavo edition in 1937. This elegant edition has the introduction to that edition as well as a new introduction dated 1950. There had been a reprinting of the 1937 original in 1943, and an influential translation into Spanish was published in that same year. This 1951 signed edition has the series designation: Colecao Documentos brasileiros, 4." See OCLC Number: 2279815 (10 locations in U.S. institutions, and 3 overseas). There are 8 full-page b/w woodcuts, 2 full-page tipped-in plates, and a large b/w birds-eye view of a typical layout of a classical Nordeste sugarcane plantation, signed in the plate by Bandeira, Recife, 1951 -- (approx. 18 1/2" x 23 1/2"). This handsome view is neatly folded and tipped to the gutter edge of the colophon leaf at the rear. ; Signed by Author .