Anti-Empire

Front matter

TUPI . aS A a WIE PANDER

Emir anti-empire decolonial interventions in lusophone literatures daniel f. silva

Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

1 Decolonizing Consumption and Postcoloniality: A Theory of Allegory in Oswald de Andrade’s Antropofagia

2 Mário de Andrade's Antropofagia and Macunaíma as Anti-Imperial Scene of Writing

Chapter One

Decolonizing Consumption and Postcoloniality: A Theory of Allegory in Oswald de Andrade's Antropofagia

Situating Antropofagia in Empire

S everal decades before Fredric Jameson’s essay ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ set off a memorable and no less theoretically and culturally important debate on postcolonial literatures, the Modernist avant-garde movement in Brazil known as Antropofagia was already reflecting on the radical significational possibilities of the narrative form that was so central to the Jameson debate: allegory. In the early and mid-1920s, two of the movement’s founders and greatest contributors, Sao Paulo natives Oswald de Andrade and Mario de Andrade (no relation), labored toward a new language of Brazilian nationhood that would both challenge and reassess the Eurocentric tendencies of Rio de Janeiro’s cultural elites. The movement’s official unveiling occurred during the week of modern arts in Sao Paulo in February of 1922 commemorating the centennial of Brazil’s independence by showcasing contemporary art forms.

Carlos A. Jauregui’s succinct assessment of Antropofagia argues that it ‘was not an academic movement, a theory of identity formation through consumption, or a social emancipation program’ (22). Partially agreeing with Jauregui’s take, the movement was far too heterogeneous, particularly on the scale of radical politics, for one to comfortably label the work spawned by its participants as a cohesive entity. Even considering these discrepancies between contributors, the movement as a whole shared different pitfalls and shortcomings that trouble retrospective readings of the movement as an emancipatory and politically engaged set of counter-discourses. Attempting to retrieve intent from the work of cultural producers is, of course, a tricky and potentially problematic endeavor. On the other hand, and despite the intent of the producer, one can nonetheless extract insights and meanings from the work toward broader goals, all differing in their politics. In the case of Antropofagia, this has notably been done in the realm of academia, particularly by scholars of critical theory, and by the political state, namely the nationalist populism of Getúlio Vargas's Estado Novo [New State] regime (1937-45).

Despite its profound and undeniable problematics, which will be covered across this chapter and the next, much can be extracted from some anthropophagic works toward the goal of grasping the reproduction of Empire and contemplating modes of delinking its signifying chains. To be clear, Antropofagia was undoubtedly a precarious and imperfect bourgeois project with undeniable political shortcomings. Nonetheless, from some works, notably those of Oswald and Mário de Andrade, one can extrapolate particular contributions to decolonial thought and the study of Empire, part of an archive of intellectual history in Latin America that reaches the formation of decolonial studies. More than a shift in national articulation, portions of the anthropophagic project proposed a new scene of writing ambivalently divergent from, and critical of, the white bourgeois gaze that informed fin-de-siêcle Rio de Janeiro's Tropical Belle Époque. This scene of writing was embodied in the very name of the movement - the cannibal metaphor of consuming the European other, including its scene of writing, and rewriting its signifiers into a re-historicized Brazil. More specifically, this new gaze articulates itself from the problematics of Brazil's colonial and early postcolonial history - appropriating rather than repressing the histories, violence suffered, and even agencies of native Amerindians, Afro-Brazilian slaves, and the industrial workers of Antropofagia’s period. To deploy such a robust significational project, anthropophagists such as Mario and Oswald de Andrade turned to allegory throughout their work. Sidestepping Jameson’s controversial generalization, this chapter aims to theorize the allegorical form within the postcolonial context as used in the fiction and thought of Antropofagia.

The movement’s postcolonial concerns, interrogated below, did not discursively target merely Brazil’s colonial period. Colonial discourse, and larger coloniality, is questioned throughout Oswald and Mario de Andrade’s work through a sort of Bhabhan ‘time-lag’, ‘a moment for revisions’ (275) informing nationhood and structuring postcolonial society. Through this perspective we can further elaborate Bhabha’s oft-cited concept as one suggesting that through the temporal break or Derridean postponement of the signified emerge not only ‘new and hybrid agencies and articulations’ (275), but also reinscriptions and reformulations of power. In this moment of significational collision - the anthropophagic moment - the renegotiation of colonial power into the nation via the maintenance of a colonial elite is contested ‘at the level of the sign’ (275) of nation.

Antropofagia, as not only a project of cultural production but also a mode of cultural thought regarding global and local power dynamics, emerged in response to particular tendencies in Brazilian literature and art often couched in and reproducing such dynamics. Drawing on Bhabha's words above, we can think of the nation, in cultural production, political rhetoric, and social discourses, as the sign through which local tensions (such as class warfare and racial marginalization) are narrativized into global, often Eurocentric, frameworks of social organization. Antônio Cândido comes to a similar conclusion regarding the emergence of a Brazilian literature, duly structuring his Formacão da Literatura Brasileira [Formation of Brazilian Literature’] as a study of this formation, ‘como síntese de tendências universalistas e particularistas’ [‘as the synthesis of universalist and particularist tendencies’] (23). As Candido suggests throughout his multivolume work, this synthesis is far from swift, often occulting various forms of violence and marginalizing voices while bestowing historical and social primacy upon others. This relationship between the universal and particular, or the historical reordering of the latter via the former, would come to inform Brazilian cultural and political elites” claims to modernity, carried out through European universalist notions of national progress.

Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropdfago’ and Pau Brasil and Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma yield historical readings that regard the particular and the universal as dialectical forces constituting power in Brazil and the nation's place within Empire. In these works to be studied in this chapter and the next, there is a consistent questioning, contestation, and playing with colonial forms of historicization from both within and without the postcolony. Oswald de Andrade's ‘Manifesto Antropófago; summarizing the goals of the movement, and even more so his collection Pau Brasil, offer nuanced examples of this.

Herein lies the anthropophagic logic of the cannibal metaphor for the contestation of coloniality: the consumption of dominant historicization and reformulation of that which historicizing subjects had hitherto consumed. This speaks to Antropofagia's twist on primitivism; one that consciously evokes native Amerindian imagery as a Eurocentrically derived text while subsequently shying away from celebrating and speaking for colonially marginalized identities such as those of Amerindians. Similarly, Oswald and Mario also tackle Eurocentric imperial notions of progress, economic structure, alterity, and political power. In this sense, their anthropophagic works dialogue well with the famous essay of Brazilian theorist Roberto Schwarz, ‘As idéias fora do lugar’ [Ideas Out of Place’].

Often used as a framework by other scholars through which to question the deployment of European/universalist aesthetics to the postcolony, the titular phrase is, for Schwarz, far more politically inflected. For Schwarz, the fundamental ‘out-of-place ideas’ speak to the contours and philosophical underpinnings of the post-independence Brazilian state, namely the paradoxical espousal of Enlightenment political values pertaining to human rights while maintaining the institution of slavery and class structures based on various forms of dependence. Schwarz argues, in other words, that the profile of the postcolony, shaped by the political formation of the First Empire at the moment of independence, offered a narrative that could never correspond to reality nor to the lived experiences of exploitation under such a reality.

Schwarz’s arguments therefore take those of Antônio Candido even further: the postcolony, as a political entity and collection of subjectivities, is itself profoundly shaped by the application of universalist ideas to particular realities, the first often occulting and/or silencing the latter. In this regard, Schwarz calls our attention to a crucial example of coloniality at work in the advent of the postcolony. Through the framework of universal (read Western) values, national scenes of writing occupied by colonial political and cultural elites re-historicize social relations by attempting to place the present within a narrative of modern Western nationhood. As Schwarz would agree, this was merely the first problematic example of placing (or erasing) the particularities of exploitation into the modernity of the universal.

Through a tentative genealogy of the application of universalist ideas, Schwarz persistently ties such applications to the reproduction of power and privilege, which are central to the theorization of Empire throughout the present volume. For Schwarz, the dialectic of favor and dependence is arguably the moving force in this materialism of power and privilege; a dialectic by which the limited practice of social mobility is contingent upon sparse and selective favors emanating from positions of power to subaltern subjects. The extortive logic of this exchange tends naturally to imply a return of favors. Schwarz’s view of social relations has often been read within Lusophone scholarly circles as pertaining to merely Brazilian realities, but Schwarz posits this dialectic as central to global realities of domination and subalternity, wrapped, of course, in discourses of universality. With regard to Europe, for instance, Schwarz postulates that ‘o universalismo visara o privilégio feudal’ [‘universalism is guided by feudal privilege’] (17). Schwarz’s focus in ‘As idéias fora do lugar’ is, nonetheless, on theorizing social relations of the Brazilian postcolony, regarding which he argues:

adotavamos sofregamente os [principios] que a burguesia européia tinha elaborado contra arbítrio e escravidão; enquanto na prática, geralmente dos próprios debatedores, sustentado pelo latifúndio, o favor reafirmava sem descanso os sentimentos e as noções em que implica. O mesmo se passa no plano das instituições, por exemplo com burocracia e justiça, que embora regidas pelo clientelismo, proclamavam as formas e teorias do estado burguês moderno. (17-18)

[we anxiously adopted the principles that the European bourgeoisie had elaborated against will and slavery; meanwhile, in practice, favors consistently reaffirmed the sentiments and notions within which large plantation owners were implicated. The same occurs at the institutional level, for example, with bureaucracy and justice which, although ruled by clientelism, looked to the forms and theories of the modern bourgeois state.)

The notion of ‘ideas out of place’ thus names the central contradictory logic of Brazilian modernity, referring specifically to the intermingling of post-Enlightenment universalist values with national institutions and everyday societal practices of dependence.

Antropofagia thus comes on the heels of numerous decades of this intermingling at the heart of the postcolony. To varying degrees, the movement sought to displace universalist ideas, articulated from Eurocentric scenes of writing, as failed modes of narrating and understanding the particular exigencies of the postcolony. In the articulation of Antropofagia’s mission, namely the questioning of European cultural forms, there is an implied call for the questioning or remolding of the universal via the nuances of the particular, including an opening for the existence of alternative sites of signification within the particular. The intensity of such a project varied depending on the member of Antropofagia.

Consumption of the Primitive

Anthropophagic thought also approaches Empire in a global framework, namely regarding the trends of global dependency and the movement of industrial capital in the Antropofagistas’ enunciatory present. Moreover, they articulate the problematics of postcoloniality within a globalized financial and cultural economy via diverse subject positions within the global periphery. In this regard, Oswald and Mario de Andrade circumvent the homogenization of difference into a generalizing binary - Jameson’s primary pitfall which Aijaz Ahmad notably condemns: ‘the enormous cultural heterogeneity of social formations within the so-called Third World is submerged within a singular identity of “experience” [of colonialism]

(104). K. David Jackson notably traces ‘the origins of antropofagia [as] inseparable from contemporary European fascination with the primitive’ (90). As a postcolonial nation on the periphery of global capital, as nation/ cultural sign, Brazil continued to be ensnared in the international field of Eurocentric imperial meaning. An object of European contemplation as tourist destination, Brazil continued to be signified from Europe - the universal site of imperial articulation and narrativization.

Brazilian cultural historian Alfredo Bosi points out a fundamental distinction that undergirds the work of Mario de Andrade, arguably the most nuanced participant in the Antropofagia movement; namely between the “primitivo histórico e o “primitivo” como pesquisa do homem que não pode deixar de ser, apesar de tudo, um homem integrado em uma dada cultura e em uma determinada civilização” [historical primitive and the “primitive” as a site of research for the man who cannot cease to be integrated within a given culture and a particular civilization’] (400; emphasis original). Bosi’s italicization of the ‘historical primitive’ arguably refers to the existence of a native subject uninscribed and unknowable to outside gazes and epistemes, in contrast to the primitive as object of imperial knowledge. This distinction echoes that which is later traced by Hélêne Cixous and Catherine Clément between absolute Other and Other as an imperial text (71). In this regard, Mario de Andrade calibrates Antropofagia as a series of layers of consumption.

The scenes of writing sought by the movement, especially in Mario de Andrade’s work, must then gauge, or consume, both the primitive and the postcolony as imperial texts, rather than inscribing fantasies of precolonial life through which to envision nationhood. For Kimberle López, this implies ‘the turning of the imperial gaze toward his own people’ (25). López also reminds us that ‘it was the European Romantics’ original valorization of the exotic that made Americans look at their own history in this fashion and, although they are American, the authors of these Romantic texts were still describing an ethnic Other’ (26). Unlike Brazilian Romantics such as José Alencar, both Mario and Oswald de Andrade, I shall argue below, read primitivism more critically, calling for a consumption of their underlying imperial gaze and its primitivist texts through which they may be destabilized and reformulated. Such an undertaking is central to their larger project of constructing an open-ended site of consumption and meaning-production that reorders imperial historicities.

In examining this aspect of Antropofagia, it is crucial to consider some of the repercussions of European primitivist writings on Brazil, the tradition of which is long and laden with notable historical figures. While a thorough study of these is beyond the scope of the present project, such writings bring varying degrees of nuance to the history of European primitivism. This fascination with primitiveness pertained not only to Brazil's indigenous population, but also to its cities, particularly Rio de Janeiro, as un-European imitations of the culturally universal metropolis. European notions of primitiveness were not always, therefore, tied to one particular racialized compartment of the ‘developing’ nation. Rather, these notions constituted the epistemological optic through which imperial Europe was to understand the nation and the global South. The primitive, as a frame of otherness, served to signify the different geographies contained within postcolonial space. The narrativization of the global from the cultural place of Europe, specifically its bourgeois cosmopolitan and consumerist strata, presents (post)colonial space as more complex than a simple homogeneity that subsumes all otherness in opposition to European bourgeois whiteness. As Walter Mignolo argues regarding the cultural dynamics of cosmopolitanism, its ‘point of origination [...] is the West, although its routes of dispersion encountered partisans beyond the Western history of ideas and political debates’ (Darker Side 252).

The signification of Brazil from Europe produces its own form of hybridity in which the primitive is a floating signifier latched onto the different socioeconomic, racial, and cultural compartments of the nation. The primitive, and its associated cultural and racial lexicon (backwards, non-European, un-modern), came to signify even that which is typically opposed to primitiveness - such as industrialization, urban development, and other trends with temporal, supposedly, European/Western origins. From the European scene of writing in the twentieth century, difference becomes the frame through which to understand particular modes of sameness. In other words, primitiveness as a surplus of meaning essentially conveyed a deficit of sameness, thus rendering the tropical city undergoing rapid modernization insufficiently modern.

The cannibal metaphor arguably stems from, and is thus posited in reaction to, the European consumption of the (post)colonial other in the form of epistemological products ranging from the creative and fictional to the ethnographic. Kimberle López's understanding of the latter as ‘inherently parasitic [...] feed[ing] off the Other, depending on the cultural “inferiority” of this Other and reinforcing its exoticism through writing’ could also apply to literary works in Europe. Fin-de-siécle European bourgeois cosmopolitan experiences, as portrayed in many a European novel of the period, emerge through the overlapping processes of European colonialism, global flows of capital, and the power dynamics they reproduce. The European bourgeois subject, who frequently traveled to and wrote on Brazil, is thus the condensation of European colonial power over not only its own continental territory but the web of global markets and othered bodies that constitute the signifying field of Empire.

Edward Said's analysis in Orientalism of Gustav Flaubert's novelistic deployment of otherness adds yet another layer of Western agency to the act of writing, in this case, the Orient: ‘Like every other Orientalism, then, Flaubert’s is revivalist: he must bring the Orient to life, he must deliver it to himself and to his readers’ (185). Flaubert’s consumption of non-European otherness - its usage in the novelistic medium - always allows a space for the consolidation of the European bourgeois ego (both individual and collective). The writer/consumer is thus also a producer - the facilitator of broader consumption through the piece of literature that is mechanically reproduced, commoditized, and circulated.

Consumption therefore implies a multilayered performance of bourgeois identity in the world of globalized capital. The reproduction and consolidation of the Western/European subject (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the case of Flaubert and his contemporaries to whom the anthropophagists were exposed) is rendered by more than the mere existence of identitarian opposition (Westernness versus otherness). It is also reproduced, as Said suggests, through the repeated and palimpsestic writing and imagining of otherness. The symbolic existence of Western imperial power, the plane of meaning upon which it is couched and experienced, is thus reproduced through the mechanisms of consumption - the repeated placement of signifiers of sameness and otherness (itself a form of consumption) - into consumable artifacts such as literature. In other words, the relationship between writing otherness and reading it, enabled by Western print industries, is crucial to the reproduction of Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

It was as a performance of consumption through which many European travelers, mainly French and English, took in Brazil during their visits. Like a Persian rug or orientalist statue, Brazilian space was to be consumed, to become a part of European bourgeois culture and knowledge, and thus signified accordingly. It is no wonder that so many travelers were, themselves, producers of meaning - artists, philosophers, diplomats, or simply writers of memoirs or travel accounts that would later be published. An important aspect of European bourgeois life is thus the creation or reproduction of knowledge, more precisely, certain imperial forms of it. As Walter Mignolo puts it, regarding the relationship between racism and epistemology, or the international division of knowledge production, ‘the First World has knowledge; the Third World has culture’ (Darker Side 118). (Post)colonial geographies are thus seen as semantically blank spaces rendered as loci of otherness through centuries of imperial power; always objects to be signified and represented, seldom agents doing the signifying.

French painter François-Auguste Biard (1799-1882), as an example of the many European travelers to narrate/render Brazil in the nineteenth century, was known as an artistically vocal abolitionist some of whose most canonical works depicted the horrors of the African slave trade. Nevertheless, other commentary of his pertaining to Africans and Afro-descendants “almost always associated) writes Ana Lucia Araujo, ‘slaves with degeneracy, explicit sexuality, and consequent disease’ (79). Araujo mentions in her book on Biard’s two-year stay in Brazil and the works he produced there that ‘he was not interested in the urban scene. He managed to organize an excursion to the forests of the province of Espirito Santo. However, since this experience did not fulfill his ambitious expectations to meet and paint Brazilian Natives, he embarked on a long expedition in the Amazonia’ (xv). Biard’s true search, in other words, was for a phantasmatic ‘pure’ otherness, understood as precolonial otherness - that which remains untouched by European civilization, despite already being an object of European knowledge. Biard’s works on Amazon life thus add another layer of meaning to the existing body of knowledge on the Amerindian other. The artistic product serves as a helpful metaphor of European imperial consumption. Biard visually consumes the other and places its image on the canvas so that it may be consumed in the European metropolis, specifically its bourgeois spaces - a site of global interpretation and inscription.

Upon returning to Paris after more than ten years, Adéle Toussaint-Samson, another French traveler in nineteenth-century Brazil, expressed how she felt “saudade (homesick), as the Brazilians say, for South America’ (101). She is, of course, referring to a particular version of Brazil and South America as it is contained within imperial knowledge. Her nostalgic longing for Brazil is directed more specifically toward ‘those immense horizons, which elevate the soul and the thoughts, my sea-baths in the moonlight on the phosphorescent beach, my horseback rides through the mountains, that beautiful bay on which the windows of my house looked out’ (100). Brazilian space, seemingly imbued with nature’s beauty and vastness, offers the opposite of ‘our Parisian life, so narrow, so luxuriant in appearance, and so scrimped in its reality’ (100). The consumption of Brazil’s ample natural space implies an enjoyment of it that is restricted to domestic and foreign elites: ‘I recalled to myself those long miles travelled over in Brazil, where nature alone takes care to bear the costs, where the unhappy one could pluck at his leisure a banana, an orange, and the palmetto without being disturbed by whomsoever it might be’ (Toussaint-Samson 100).

This exotic terrain and its exotic signifiers are, of course, a surplus, never a substitute, to the already-consumed metropolitan city life that is nonetheless the imperial subjective place from which the consumption of the other takes place: ‘One thing consoled me upon my return for the littleness of material existence. “Here I am, returned to the country of thought and progress,” said I’ (Toussaint-Samson 101). The metropolis is never decentered as the spatial-cultural-economic core of bourgeois cosmopolitan identity and imperial signification. To displace this core would foreclose the signification and consumption of the peripheral postcolonial nation as the exotic commodity.

Rearranging Consumption

Antropofagia emerged in the wake of over three centuries of Portuguese colonialism, and another of continued colonial power in which the postcolony remains entrapped in transnational industrial capital and an imperial web of intercultural meanings in which other European powers partook, as in the examples of Biard and Toussaint-Samson. Evando Nascimento traces the two modes of appropriating European cultural forms hypothetically confronted by Oswald de Andrade. The first option would have been ‘de maneira servil, ou seja, sem reinvenção do legado, uma mera repetição sem diferença [...] a irreflexão quanto da impossibilidade de pensar ou realizar algo diferente do que o europeu já tenha feito’ [‘in a servile fashion, that is, without reinvention of the legacy, a mere repetition without difference (...) the failure to consider the impossibility of thinking or achieving something different from that which the European had already done”] (344). This would seem to be the path taken by many artists and intellectuals in Tropical Belle Epoque Rio de Janeiro; that is, the use of cultural and aesthetic practices with little reflection on the transatlantic or global/colonial power dynamics to be found at their core. The second option - that chosen by Oswald de Andrade and the Antropofagistas - was that which ‘visaria, no gesto mesmo de tomar a cultura europeia para enxertá-la em território nacional, digeri-la, fazendo uma seleção, e impondo um cruzamento com elementos autóctones” [‘would aim, through the very gesture of taking European culture to insert it into the national territory, to digest it, selecting pieces of it, and crossing it with autochthonous elements’] (345).

The movement thus takes up consumption not merely as the reappropriation of a colonial trope of primitive otherness - now it is directed against European cultural forms and global flows of capital. After all, ‘the cannibal text had originated in Europe; since Montaigne and Staden, cannibal tales have been a prime source for the Western imagination’ (Jackson 92-93).

The primitive construction of the Amerindian within European colonial discourse - idealized and admired for his ties to nature by renowned European cultural figures such as Montaigne and Chateaubriand - is reformulated by the Antropofagia movement into the horrific European image of the Amerindian, the cannibal that threatens European presence. The image of the cannibal, itself a colonial stereotype/fantasy, is explored by the Antropofagistas fundamentally as an ontological site of transgression vis-a-vis imperialism, cultural and economic. Jackson observes that:

Brazilian avant-garde artists reinvent primitive society from a New World perspective. They explore cannibalism as a metaphor, broadened to include other ritual practices, in a theory of national autonomy and development opposed to Europe [...] substituting periphery for center, they propose indigenous society as a mythical locus for renewing Western social philosophy, ethnography, and art. (90-91)

The cannibal trope is, at its core, deployed to decenter the ontological site of consumption, theorizing how the postcolony situates itself, culturally, within contemporary global power and capital. This implies an opposition not only to Europe and the global North’s consumption of the postcolony, but also to the Eurocentric forms of culture and social organization in the postcolony’s main cities. Jackson thus posits Antropofagia as ‘an avenue to postcolonial intellectual autonomy’ (91). He goes on to assert that the movement ‘exploit[s] primitivism conceptually by constructing a wild cultural and philosophical theory, in which primitivism reconstructs national identity’ (91).

Jackson is one of many critics who have approached Antropofagia in terms of a cultural project of reformulating national identity. We can, however, read Antropofagia (through the anthropophagic works of Mario and Oswald de Andrade) differently - as a project tied to decolonial writing against Empire and as a project that stops just short of national identity, by narrating a place from which national identity and a reformulation of the nation-sign can emerge. To this end, both writers labor toward a model for the postcolony to also consume, that is, to ingest, meaning - be it cultural, economic, or ethnographic - and reformulate it, thus signifying it anew, enunciating knowledge from the site once consumed. In other words, Mario and Oswald de Andrade’s conception of the anthropophagic being is more of a scene of writing than a mapping of national identity. Oswald de Andrade (like many other contributors to Antropofagia), alludes often to the search and/or construction of ‘o Brasil-brasileiro’ [‘the Brazilian Brazil’]. While he arguably establishes this national reformulation as the ultimate goal, one can also read his work as focusing more on the process of reaching it - through the metaphor of consumption - than on establishing the cultural parameters and characteristics of this revised nation-sign.

Focusing on consumption, Antropofagia is concerned with more than ‘etiologies: the origins of a genuine national culture’ (Madureira 22). As Luis Madureira points out in his exploration of the movement, ‘these original sources can be retrieved only in simulacral form, only as protean, unreliable traces from which the authenticity of the original Brazilians (a profoundly inauthentic expression) must be purged of the distortions imposed by Renaissance [Europe]’ (22). The anthropophagist interest in consumption and its significational ramifications, though, suggests that some members of the movement were invested less in articulating a national culture than in theorizing an ontological place from which such a culture or cultures may emerge. Madureira thus recognizes ‘the possibility that antropofagia anticipates what Paulo Freire has called a “postmodern” alternative to the west’s narrative of emancipation: the repudiation of a “modernist” politics’ (23).

At the core of my exploration of allegory in Mario and Oswald de Andrade’s work is the argument that in laboring toward a new ontological location from which to produce culture, Antropofagia was not a search for an authentic pre-European Brazilianness. Rather, Antropofagia’s deployment of the primitive is a strategic recycling of Western imperial signifiers, a form of ‘writing back to a variety of metropolitan pundits, as Albert Braz frames Mario de Andrade’s dialogue with primitivism (17). In other words, anthropophagic primitiveness does not evoke what came before colonialism, itself an intangible, but instead builds over the products of Western hegemony as it continues to reproduce itself. Oswaldo Costa, another contributor to the modernist movement, perhaps captures this mission most succinctly in the first issue of Revista de Antropofagia: ‘O Brasil occidentalisado é, portanto, um caso de pseudomorphose historica [...]. Só a antropophagia consegue resolve-lo. Como? Comendo-o’ [“Westernized Brazil is, therefore, a case of historical pseudo-morphosis (...). Only anthropophagy can resolve it. How? By eating it’] (6). The project of Antropofagia regarding History, the narrative of Western power, is thus to consume it, from its imposed margins - the otherness which Empire engendered - in order to move beyond said otherness, becoming subject rather than object of meaning and cultural production. This means, in the poetic words of Oswald de Andrade, to cease being the place “donde a nunca exportação da poesia” [of no poetic export’] (Pau Brasil 101).

The objective is not necessarily to wipe out or erase in order to begin anew, as tends to be the case with modernist projects, and as many literary and cultural critics have read Antropofagia, but to set in motion a reconfiguration of the Western signifying chain through which notions of Brazilianness can be de-Occidentalized, or decolonized. The reconfiguration would emerge via a thinkingthrough ofhow to consume that signifying chain - from withinit,not so much from outside of it, or before it. This therefore counters the ‘modernist assumption of the death of the past as the basis of historical understanding” (Spiegel 149). The very choice of the cannibal as the image of the movement and its fundamental political project suggests the impossibility of killing imperial narrativization and what it has left throughout several centuries, while indicating an anthropophagic cognizance of that impossibility. The digestion of the imperial entity, to be sure, always implies a continuity, for better or worse, rather than an effective elimination.