'Pretos e Brancos': Brito Camacho and the antropological gaze of colonial literature

In this article I explore the connections between colonial literature and an­thropology during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through the analysis of Brito Camacho’s Pretos e Brancos (1926), I argue that some of the literary works that won the Contest of Colonial Literature are imbued with an anthropologic gaze. By this, I mean that colonial literature and anthropology were constituted as two intertwined colonial “knowledges” from the beginning of the colonial project. Both “knowledges” -literary and anthropological- served the objective of the construction and legitimi­zation of the Portuguese colonial empire.