THE AFRICAN LEGACY: THE POWER OF RACE AND CLIMATE IN THE FORMATION OF PEOPLE AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE FORMATION OF BRAZILIAN SOCIETY

ABSTRACT: History has been cruel to those born in the tropics, and even more cruel to those who, in addition to tropical condition, were also blacks or Indians. The aim of this paper is to observe how blacks were treated within the travel literature about Brazil, especially in the writings published in Revue des Deux Mondes. From the analysis of French writing, we seek to bring the impressions of the travelers about blacks in Brazil, and how they saw this element from a civilizational and European perspective, in which the white man represents the progress and the black and Indian represent the civilizational backwardness. Thus, we try to show the views and prejudices to the black man in Brazil in the nineteenth-century, due to hypothetical racial issues and theoretical models which condemned the progress in the tropics