Tropical Humanism in the Work of Jorge Amado: mestiçagem, diversity, and inclusion in the Amadian novel

Abstract

This article examines the work of Bahian writer Jorge Amado (1912-2001) through the interpretive hypothesis of a “tropical humanism”: a literary project that, starting from social realism and the denunciation of inequality in the cacao-cycle novels, gradually shifts toward an affirmative celebration of popular life, racial and cultural mestiçagem, and Afro-Bahian religious syncretism. Drawing on established critical scholarship — particularly the work of Alfredo Bosi, Eduardo de Assis Duarte, and Ilana Seltzer Goldstein — the article argues that the transition between the so-called two phases of Amado's fiction (the “proletarian literature” of the 1930s-1940s and the mestizo lyricism inaugurated by Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, 1958) is not a rupture but the unfolding of the same humanist commitment to Bahia's popular subjects. Drawing on Disability Studies and queer criticism, it also discusses the unevenly distributed limits of this humanism regarding disability and sexual dissidence. It concludes that Amado's tropical humanism amounts to a poetics of corporeality, orality, and ethnic-religious diversity that projected, both nationally and internationally, a specific — and not uncontroversial — image of mestizo Brazilianness.