LATE COLONIAL ESTRANGEMENT AND MISCEGENATION IDENTITY AND AUTHENTICITY IN THE COLONIAL IMAGINATION IN THE DUTCH AND LUSOPHONE (POST) COLONIAL WORLDS Ulbe Bosma International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands Fernando Rosa Ribeiro Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil ABSTRACT This paper attempts to reassess the work of two contemporary writers in the 1930s: Gilberto Freyre in Brazil and E. du Perron in the Netherlands Indies (Indonesia). Their famous narratives (respectively, Casa-Grande e Senzala and Het Land van Herkomst) present a (post) colonial world where inequality, violence and racism are almost as conspicuous as mixing and contact across the colour lines. In fact, although one work is a sociological and historical interpretation of colonial and imperial Brazil and the other a literary reworking of personal reminiscences related to Indies society in the early twentieth century, both construct worlds that present several important similarities. Keywords: postcolonialism, literary imagination, Brazil, colonial Indonesia. INTRODUCTION Literary imagination has now become widely and fruitfully used as a critical source to analyse colonial cultures. Some critics have pointed out that this might privilege colonial discourse, as the overwhelming majority of these testimonies carry the stamp of the colonial master narrative of colonial and racial dichotomies. We would like to focus, however, on E. du Perron (1899–1940) in the Dutch East Indies and Brazil’s Gilberto Freyre (1900–87), both of whom have featured prominently in colonial and postcolonial literature. Their work is complex and their view of their respective societies sophisticated. Freyre and Du Perron have been able to relate colonial history, their personal biography and their countries’ future within a common imaginative framework. They both wrote about the world of their youth and the past of their societies in order to reflect upon a new postcolonial nation in the making. BOSMA & RIBEIRO Late Colonial Estrangement and Miscegenation 29 Addresses for correspondence: Ulbe Bosma, International Institute of Social History, Cruquiusweg 31, 1019 AT Amsterdam, Netherlands. E-mail: ubo@iisg.nl Fernando Rosa Ribeiro, Departamento de História – IFCH, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campus Zeferino Vaz – Barão Geraldo, 13081-970 Campinas – SP – C.P. 6610, Brazil. E-mail: frosaribeiro@yahoo.fr Cultural and Social History, Volume 4, Issue 1, pp. 29–50 © The Social History Society 2007