Hispano-skepticism, Classical Liberalism, and Popular Historiography On Guia Politicamente Incorreto da América Latina. Leandro Narloch and Duda Teixeira

Abstract

In a brief, scathing review published on August 30, 2011 in the Folha de São Paulo, Sylvia Colombo wrote that Leandro Narloch and Duda Teixeira’s recent Guia Politicamente Incorreto da América Latina, “coloca agora mais um tijolinho no muro de ignorância e soberbia que separa o Brasil do resto do continente,” before summarily judging the book “horrible” (ruim). Colombo’s dismissal of the Guia, though uncharitable, is comprehensible. Narloch and Teixeira’s book follows Narloch’s Guia Politicamente Incorreto da História do Brasil (2009), an exercise in deliberately provocative revisionist history that, though a popular success, angered academic historians and political leftists with its heretical interpretations of the national past—in which, for example, Brazil’s indigenous communities benefited from colonization through exposure to the edifying force of global trade.