Anthropophagia and Those Twenties in Brazil: Good Old Days or Bad New Ones?

Old Debates, New Critiques 

In Europe, the 1920s still produce a certain nostalgia for the libertine rejection of social mores, bohemian lifestyles, experimentation, and utopian visions related with that era’s avant-garde movements, which have been romanticized in films and television series. In Brazil, however, criticizing the São Paulo-based modernist movement is almost a tradition. The Semana de Arte Moderna from 1922 has now celebrated its centennial, and, as with each remembrance of the event, there are movement symbols as well as emblematic works and authors that are challenged, shaken up, and torn asunder.

There are some who assert that the importance ascribed to the Semana in the history of Brazilian arts and letters is overblown. One of the debates generating the most polemic response during the centennial celebration was the argument advanced in the recent book by Ruy Castro: As vozes da metrópole. Uma antologia do Rio dos anos 20 [Voices in the Metropolis: An Anthology of 1920s Rio de Janeiro] (Companhia das Letras, 2021). ² Here, the author directly attacks the São-Paulo-based group from 1922 as well as much of the subsequent critical reception of their work. For Ruy Castro, it wasn’t the Semana that initiated the modernist movement in Brazil: Rio de Janeiro was already abuzz with the work of Benjamin Costallat, Théo Filho, and Agrippino Grieco, among others. The event would not have been more than a limited “gathering among friends” had these conservative-leaning playboys not been supported by the provincial and retrograde São-Paulo-based elite who knew nothing about modern art but controlled newspapers and journalistic outlets.

In Ruy Castro’s assessment, Oswald de Andrade was nothing more than a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, and a reactionary polemicist who can be compared to former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Mário de Andrade was a “self-righteous and sanctimonious prude” who lived with his aunts and cousins until the end of his life. ³ According to Castro, it would be a mistake to consider Macunaíma, O abaporu, Pau Brasil poetry, and Anthropophagia ⁴ as artistic proposals that could be detached from the Semana, and even more so when considering the case of modernist works being created outside of São Paulo. That mistaken understanding of the Semana of 1922 would be the triumph of the argument that São Paulo had a pathfinding (bandeirante) role in the modernist movement. This argument (“el discurso bandeirante paulista”), Castro asserts, was advanced by the dominance of “the University of São Paulo’s academic enterprise (industria académica)” that has effectively “canceled” the modernist movement present in the rest of Brazil. ⁵

This line of critique is primarily directed against the readings advanced by Mário da Silva Brito and Antonio Candido, as well as other writers who follow that same line of research and argument. ⁶ Over the course of their work, both Brito and Candido have signaled the importance of the São-Paulo-based modernist movement for the development of art and culture in the country. ⁷ In “Literatura e cultura de 1900 a 1945,” Candido describes the Semana de Arte Moderna as the catalyst for the new literature orienting emergent tendencies toward innovations in poetry, essay, music, and the visual arts (123). ⁸ Macunaíma is singled out as the emblematic work of the movement (127), with its conferral of “literary status” on folk sayings and satire, indigenous legends, and other forms of expression that, until that point, had been excluded from national identity. Candido praises the experimentation, the humor, and the audacity of Brazilian modernist works of art, as well as their ability to unify the local and the cosmopolitan. He also argues that the Semana is linked with political transformations in that era, such as the founding of the Communist Party in Brazil and the subsequent intellectual work of Caio Prado, Jr., Gilberto Freyre, and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. Candido’s primary interest is not a defense of São Paulo as cultural identity but instead to highlight the driving force of the poor and working class embedded in the objectivity of the works within the modernist movement.

Antonio Candido is, of course, one of the central points of reference in the realm of scholarship on the modernist movement. It is also the case, however, that critics like Castro are absolutely mistaken when asserting that Candido does not consider the class contradictions within the movement. For example, in “A literatura na evolução de uma comunidade,” Candido notes:

More to the point, it would be difficult to defend an assertion that sees an acritical championing of the modernist imaginary on the part of scholars working in the critical tradition based at the University of São Paulo. ¹⁰

In his book Vanguardas em retroceso [The Avant-Garde in Retreat] (Companhia das Letras, 2012), ¹¹ which was published on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the Semana, Sérgio Miceli developed an analysis along similar lines to those developed by Castro. While his study was more academic, it focused on the trajectories of practitioners of Brazilian modernism and the Argentine avant-garde, which were marked by their iconoclastic intentions. Miceli calls attention to Oswald de Andrade’s proximity to the Partido Republicano Paulista (one of the conservative parties of the period), to the trips that the married couple Tarsiwald ¹² made to Paris (and the fact that a member of their wedding party was none other than Washington Luís ¹³ ), and to the relationships the São Paulo modernist authors maintained with the ruling class (the so-called “quattrocentist” families, like the Prado and Guedes Penteado families). Among other things, Miceli works to dismantle the argument that the artistic production of modernism had been independent and national. For that reason, he critiques the financing that the coffee-planting elite in São Paulo provided with the goal of acquiring the appearance of modernity and acquiring relevance abroad.

Historical and sociological analyses like Miceli’s make important observations in their attempt to contextualize São-Paulo-based modernism, but they also, at times, are hampered by a kind of personalization. That is, they attribute the oppression of an entire class to specific individuals and reduce the works of art they produce to the ideology that corresponds to the authors’ position in the social order. ¹⁴ Many of Miceli’s arguments are correct, but they lack an analysis of the works of art produced in that period. Additionally, the discovery that the Semana of 1922 was a São-Paulo-centric and bourgeois affair is not something new. The Semana’s own participants recognized this fact. In the preface to his novel Serafim Ponte Grande, Oswald asserts that he was the bourgeoisie’s clown, their “dim-witted, sentimental, and poetic index” (57). ¹⁵ Brazilian Modernism, he asserts, had been nothing more than a diagram of the rising price of coffee, and Pau Brasil poetry an imperialist endeavor (57). ¹⁶ In his 1942 talk, “O movimento modernista,” Mário de Andrade looks back at the decade of the 1920s and concludes that the elites in Rio de Janeiro in that era were much more modern than the elites in São Paulo. He asserts that modernism had been a movement fundamentally tied to the coffee economy and to the process of industrialization in São Paulo. In this way, arguments developed by critics like Castro and Miceli, despite the accuracy stemming from their sociological approach, are not new but instead have formed a part of the movement’s own self-critique in the decades following the 1930s.

From another angle, various new critical approaches to the movement have emerged in recent years in the realms of art and politics. In 2019, Denilson Baniwa and Pedro Gradella were the co-curators of the exhibition “Reantropofagia” at the Centro de Artes at the Universidad Federal Fluminense. In this exhibition, the only participants were Indigenous artists, such as Aredze Xukuru, Daiara Tukano, Naná Kaingang, Jaider Esbell, and the artists’ collective Ascuri. ¹⁷ Baniwa is the author of one of the most widely circulated images from the centennial: a painting, a kind of still life, with a tray featuring the novel Macunaíma and the severed head of Mário de Andrade, surrounded by pieces of tropical fruit and adornments. According to statements appearing with the work at the exhibition, the painting is “a manifesto. We are the ones who need to speak about Antropofagia! It was necessary to cut off the head of Mário de Andrade and serve it up on a platter with local condiments and pepper so as to open a space for Macunaimî.” ¹⁸ Together with Esbell, Baniwa problematizes Mário’s use of Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s book, which indiscriminately mixed and recombined the myths from a wide and diverse set of indigenous groups. The work aims to critique the characterization of Macunaimî as Macunaíma, the novel’s lazy, untrustworthy main character. ¹⁹

The same impulse governs the publication of Macunaimã: o mito através do tempo. ²⁰ This work was collectively written and lists as authors Taurepang, Macuxi, Wapichana, Marcelo Ariel, Mário de Andrade, Deborah Goldemberg, Theodor Koch-Grünberg, and Iara Rennó. Illustrated by Esbell, the work is a theatrical piece in which the peoples who have inherited Macunaimã interrogate Mário de Andrade, who returns from the afterlife to debate with the authors the uses he made of indigenous myths. The works by both Baniwa and the collective involving Esbell are premised on a re-elaboration of the past, through a reflection on cultural appropriation. Their critiques of the modernist movement constitute a constructive, anthropophagic relationship, which makes use of aspects of the aesthetic project initiated by Oswald and Mário de Andrade. Mário likely would have been delighted by the painting Baniwa created.

That same year, there were other exhibitions that also placed the Semana at their center. One of them was “Abaporu periférico,” which was staged in the Museu Catavento and featured graffiti artists reinterpreting the modernist works of Anita Malfatti, Zina Aita, John Graz, Tarsila do Amaral, and Di Cavalcanti. The exhibition was extended afterward through the creation of a moveable version of it, which enabled the exhibition to be staged throughout the peripheral areas of São Paulo, which was organized under the notion that modernism could be “peripherized.” At the same time, the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros at the University of São Paulo staged the show “Era Uma Vez o Moderno,” which was the largest exhibition on the Semana staged up to that point. It featured journals, letters, manuscripts, photographs, and works by various artists. One of the curatorial goals articulated by Luiz Armando Bagolun and Fabrício Reiner was precisely to demonstrate just how the modernist movement, in spite of the propaganda surrounding the Semana, often was sustained by contributions from other states.

Aside from the well-worn critiques of the São-Paulo-centrism of the modernist movement, other lines of research have opened up in the last decade. The powerful wave of feminist political activity and activism in Latin America has led to a resurgence of the debate regarding the role of women in the movement, both inside and outside São Paulo. It is worth remembering that the modernist group was first organized in 1917 following the exhibition of the work of one woman, Anita Malfatti, and the subsequent critiques directed against her by Monteiro Lobato in the famous essay “A propósito da Exposiçao Malfatti,” which was later re-titled and came to be known as “Paranoia ou Mistificação?” In addition to the figures of Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, and Patrícia Galvão (in the area of literature), artists such as Antonieta Santos Feio, Maria Pardos, Nicolina Vaz de Assis, Julieta de França, Abigail de Andrade, and Georgina de Albuquerque have been re-evaluated as modernists or pre-modernists (in the realm of visual arts). In 2017, Paulo Herkenhoff organized an exhibition entitled “Invenções da Mulher Moderna” for the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. Focusing on lesser-studied female painters and sculptors, it is just one example of a wide array of exhibitions organized in Brazil in recent years focusing on women who participated in the modernist movement. They form part of an effort to re-orient the history of the movement away from its close focus on the male figures (los andrades) associated with it.

Another event, which took place in 2021, also had important repercussions for the political questions associated with the centennial celebrations. On July 24, the group Revolução Periférica set fire to the artist Júlio Guerra’s statue of the bandeirante (colonial settler or “pathfinder”) Borba Gato, which was installed in São Paulo in 1963. The action was a form of protest against the homage to the bandeirantes who captured, enslaved, and killed the indigenous; raped and trafficked indigenous women; and wiped out entire ethnic groups. Among the participants in the actions was Paulo Galo Lima, one of the leaders of the group Entregadores Antifascistas, a movement that fights for the rights of the thousands of precarious workers employed by digital platforms in Brazil, which, together, constitute the country’s largest employer. The activist was arrested as a result of the protest. The destruction of the statue was not only about righting historical wrongs but also about showing how the logic of the bandeirante operates in the contemporary context: Black and Indigenous populations continue to be exploited and subjugated by a white elite, a situation that worsens each day with the hegemony of the right wing in the Brazilian social order. This event led to the debate about another statue: “O monumento às bandeiras” by the modernist artist Víctor Brecheret. The statue was an homage to the bandeirantes Fernão Dias, Anhanguera, and Borba Gato. The work was completed in 1954, but it was conceived in the 1920s in the context of the explicit esteem that the São-Paulo-based modernists maintained for the bandeirantes.

A large percentage of progressive intellectuals and those on the Brazilian left rejected the decision to set fire to the statue and could not recognize in that act of protest the spirit of the avant-garde. A defense of efforts to settle longstanding debts from the past—and in the present—was set aside, and many defended the idea that art is above political questions, while completely ignoring the solutions from other countries where these kinds of public artworks have been problematized. This incident only fed the fire burning around the centennial celebrations of the Semana. ²¹ Which of the following is most accurately described as an identity politics: 1. the social movements rebelling against the ongoing oppression of Black and indigenous populations or 2. the worldview of the white elites and contemporary bandeirantes in São Paulo who continue to view São Paulo as the engine moving the country forward? How present is the bandeirante point of view in the works of Oswald and Mário de Andrade or in those of Tarsila do Amaral and others? How does the praise for the bandeirante, which is unequivocally present in the works and journalistic activities of many associated with the modernist movement, affect the contemporary reception of those works? In addition to these questions, there remains one additional, final one, which is intimately connected to social conditions on the periphery and appears in much of its literature: how can we understand modernist nationalism in an era in which the extreme right wing has refashioned the very notion of homeland? One hundred years after the event, the question remains the same: what is the true legacy of the Semana of 1922 and what should we do with it?

It is impossible to deny that this tension is what makes the debate surrounding the Semana a live and active one. On the one hand, as we see in Baniwa’s art, modernism casts a shadow on other aesthetic tendencies and other producers of art in the country. On the other hand, as Fred Coelho has noted, the Semana was an important and foundational moment, one on which (or against which) other modernisms in Brazil were able to establish themselves. As Coelho states, “at the same time that the centrality of São-Paulo-based modernism ascribed to other modernisms in Brazil a mere supporting or background role, it is perhaps only possible to cognize these other modernisms because the São Paulo model, as a vector for aesthetic activity, was disseminated throughout the remaining modern spaces in the country” (29). ²²

The collective and organized nature of the Semana and of some of its resulting offshoots, such as Anthropophagia, seems like a crucial part of its foundational nature. An analysis of this collective and organized element of the movement—its status as an “ism”—can be productive not only for understanding the effects of modernism in the national context but also for analyzing its place in the broader transnational context, something that is usually regarded as a secondary factor in scholarship on these works. When we set to one side the national aspects of the movement, we are required to set aside as well any notion that Brazilian modernism is simply a copy of European models (as suggested by Antonio Candido). In so doing, we can incorporate it into the broader history of the avant-garde (in line with the critical proposals of Fredric Jameson and Martin Puchner), and, perhaps, see it in a new light. Beginning with a few observations on Anthropophagia, this article develops the above framework in an effort to contribute to the analysis and understanding of the Semana and its centennial celebrations.

An “Ism” with an “Ia:” Modernism or Anthropophagia?

An ism is a collective, programmatic, and self-aware project. As a movement, it is of the kind that is contradictory: at the same time that a certain idea of art takes precedence over any individual work, the collaborative effort that the movement presupposes gives power to the efforts to create individual works of art. Because of that, the “isms” are always motivated by the impulse of an art that transcends itself. ²³

But, is it the case that we have in Brazil what we can call our own “ism?” In Mexico, they have Muralism; in France, Surrealism; in Germany, Expressionism; in Chile, Creationism; in Russia, Constructivism; and so on. In Brazil, we have modernism, a movement in which there is the convergence of diverse and sometimes antagonistic variants of Surrealism, Dadaism, and Indigenism. Modernism is yet one more example of the phenomenon Roberto Schwarz has described: opposing sets of ideas that in other places are divorced from each other, in Brazil, are united and walk hand in hand. ²⁴ As a movement in which a variety of tendencies converge, Brazilian modernism does not have a precise or clearly defined framework in terms of its aesthetics nor in terms of its politics. For that reason, a repeated assertion in the scholarship is that Brazilian modernism is nothing more than a copy of the European avant-garde movements: Tarsila do Amaral copied Cézanne; Oswald copied Cendrars, and so on.

The São-Paulo-based modernist authors were, as so many other artists on the capitalist periphery, in awe of options made available by Futurism. ²⁵ As Mário da Silva Brito has pointed out, Futurism was a cipher for modernity, a kind of “empty signifier” (Laclau 36) through which Brazilian artists and intellectuals were able to express their desire to overcome national backwardness (el atraso nacional). ²⁶ In this context, Mário de Andrade believed that it was better to speak of modernism in order to avoid assertions of copying or other similar problems. ²⁷ However, the choice for the vaguer term modernism, which sought to preserve a certain notion of progress contained within the term Futurism, was ultimately unable to conjure the specter of the avant-garde as a “misplaced idea” in Brazil. ²⁸ As was the case with all other literary movements in Latin America, Brazilian modernism was characterized as structured by a catching-up logic, one that takes as given the idea that aesthetic autonomy is dependent on national autonomy, which, in the case of countries in the Third World, is understood to be incomplete, failed, and illusory. ²⁹

The ability to recognize Anthropophagia as an “ism,” that is, as a collective, programmatic, and self-aware project, was perhaps only possible during the decade of the 1960s with its offshoots in Tropicália, Concretism, and Cinema Novo. Oswald de Andrade’s work was revisited by Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos in poetry; by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade in cinema; by Caetano Veloso in music; by José Celso Martínez Correa in theater; and by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica (who translated the “Manifesto Antropófago” into English) in the visual arts, among others. In other words, Anthropophagia was the foundation of what Roberto Schwarz called the cultural hegemony of the left in the 1960s. ³⁰ A significant part of the analysis of Oswald de Andrade was guided by the readings proposed in that era.

Earlier, some critics had pointed in the direction of this analytical path. Antonio Candido argued in “A literatura na evolução de uma comunidade” and in various other texts that Anthropophagia maintained an important role in the modernist project as a whole: ³¹

Benedito Nunes, one of the most important analysts of Oswald de Andrade’s work in Brazil, has also called attention to the programmatic and philosophic character of Anthropophagia, which would be laid out in the “Manifesto da poesia Pau Brasil” (1924) and the “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) and further developed in Meu Testamento (1944), A Arcádia e a Inconfidência (1945), A Crise da Filosofia Mesiânica (1950), Um aspecto Antropofágico da Cultura Brasileira: O Homem Cordial (1950), and A Marcha das Utopias (1953). ³³ In his book Vanguardas Latino-Americanas, Jorge Schwartz includes Anthropophagia in his analysis of the modernisms central to Brazil and the region more broadly, that is, as a Latin American movement. In spite of these approaches, scholarship has generally considered Anthropophagia as a branch or episode in the history of modernism rather than as a stand-alone “ism.”

The history of the movement is well-known. On January 11, 1928, Tarsila do Amaral showed Oswald a painting titled “Man, seated on the ground and more”—now the most valuable work of art by a Brazilian artist—which was renamed Abaporu. The name comes from the union of two words: Aba, which means “man,” and poru, “who eats,” which appeared in a Tupi-Guarani dictionary in the era. And with this, Anthropophagia was emerging. In the months that followed, Oswald de Andrade would write the manifesto that gave the movement its name, ³⁴ and also the novel Serafim Ponte Grande (which would be published later in 1933). He would also found with other members of the modernist group the Revista de Antropofagia. ³⁵ Mário de Andrade would publish Macunaíma, o herói sem nenhum caráter. As Aracy Amaral notes, this movement was already beginning to take shape in 1923 with Tarsila’s painting A Negra, which, for its part, inspired the earlier manifesto on Pau Brasil Poetry. ³⁶ It is worth noting that Anthropophagia, as I will demonstrate in a moment, is not simply a continuation of the political and aesthetic approaches to Brazil developed in the “Manifesto Pau Brasil” and in Pau Brasil Poetry but instead a movement that was able to achieve a refinement of the naïve nationalism of that earlier movement.

It was only in 1928, which is to say, six years after the Semana de Arte Moderna, that the Anthropophagia Movement acquired the shape that would come to define it as a collective project: the first edition of the journal had 55 contributors, and many of them came from other regions of the country and some from outside it. The primary works for which the journal would become known were the “Manifesto Antropófago,” by Oswald de Andrade; Abaporu and Antropofagia, by Tarsila do Amaral; and Macunaíma, by Mário de Andrade, as well as the three dentições (“teethings” or iterations) of the Revista de Antropofagia. This does not mean that it was a wholly cohesive movement. A characteristic aspect of “isms” is their ability to encompass artists engaged at a variety of levels and whose work is not reducible to the movement as a whole. ³⁷ Plínio Salgado, for example, was a contributor to the first dentição of the Revista de Antropofagia and wrote the “Manifesto Nhengaçu Verde-Amarelo” in 1929, and with his national-flag-colored positioning (verde-amarelismo), he would go on to become one of the primary representatives of the country’s extreme right wing variant of nationalism. Oswald de Andrade himself would reconsider the project during the 1930s. The strength of an “ism,” however, comes precisely from the contradictions it harbors. While I lack the space (and because it lays outside the scope of this article) to provide a complete overview of the debates embedded in the works comprising the movement, I will say a few words about one of its foundational works: the “Manifesto.”

Althought the “Manifesto” is likely the most debated topic in relation to the Semana, some observations regarding the relation between its form and the premises of the avant-garde can aid in our understanding of what Antonio Candido calls “the moment of maximum density for the modernist dialectic.” In other words, analyzing the manifesto as form makes possible an understanding of the specific relationship it establishes between literature and politics. This is especially relevant when we keep in mind both the repeated critiques of the modernist movement as a mere ideological vector for the ideology of the ruling classes and the politics of the coffee-cultivating economy and also the understanding of Anthropophagia as one of the various artistic efforts linked to bourgeois initiatives overcome national cultural underdevelopment (“o atraso”). There are two ideas that should be considered in relation to this analysis. First, there is the need to analyze the avant-garde within the framework of the combined and unequal development of literary modernism (beginning with some of Fredric Jameson’s observations). Second, and no less important, is the need to analyze the emergence of the manifesto as a form in its own right in this framework and the role that this form has for a specific relation between literature and politics. To understand the analysis of the “Manifesto Antropófago,” it is necessary to sketch out these two ideas.

A Marxist Theory of World Literature: Manifestos and the Avant-Garde

In the realm of critical theory, celebrated studies of modernism and the avant-garde, such as, for example, those by Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Peter Bürger, place their focus on a series of social, historical, and aesthetic elements that are in play with the emergence of those movements. Benjamin demonstrates that it is impossible to understand the avant-garde without a consideration of technological development in the early twentieth century. ³⁸ In his book on aesthetics with its basis in an analysis of music and literature, Adorno points to the development of intra-aesthetic technique (the elements that the social and historical fields do not have directly available, but which become available in the way they are interpellated through their appearance in aesthetic form) and to the avant-garde’s imperative, which calls for the new and maintains affinities with capitalism. Bürger’s definition of the avant-garde begins with its impulse to negate the autonomy of art in favor of the praxis of life. ³⁹ None of them includes in their analysis the art of the capitalist periphery nor do they attempt to understand modernism from the perspective of what Trotsky called combined and unequal development and that Immanuel Wallerstein would later call the world system. ⁴⁰

As a reader of both critical theory and the literature and literary criticism of the Third World, Jameson demonstrated that a Eurocentric focus took its toll on the analytical reliability of critical theory. The lack of analysis of works from the periphery and semi-periphery of the world system impeded scholars’ ability to glimpse another phenomenon that was at the heart of artistic practice and aesthetic debates at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth: the clash between Old World and New World, between Europe, its semi-periphery and its colonies. On this score, modernism, as Jameson suggests in The Modernist Papers, can be understood as the first instance of a simultaneous world literature from one and the same time. ⁴¹ In other words, this world literature is not produced merely through the processes of translation (as Goethe stated) and the exportation of foreign models to the colonies, but instead is practically simultaneous in all parts of the world due to the unfolding contradictions of capitalism on a global scale. Moreover, in a point that is important for what concerns us here, this world literature, in terms of its formal characteristics, emerges in a way that is as intelligible in the capitalist periphery as it is in the crisis-dominated center. If we can say, for example, that the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel as form met difficulties in being adapted to the social realities of the capitalist periphery, as Roberto Schwarz demonstrates, modernism is another story entirely. ⁴²

It is for this reason that Mário’s Macunaíma and Oswald’s Serafim Ponte Grande can be understood as answers to the crisis of the novel in the 1920s in just the same way as Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), or Kafka’s The Trial (1925), among others. ⁴³ The disintegration of the individual, the break of linear modes of space and time, the fragmentation and shifting of narrative voice and point of view, the insufficiencies of representational language—that is, everything that modernism sought to capture, configure and express in the realm of aesthetics as bourgeois forms of life, individuation, and sociability dissolved—established an enormously impactful affinity with realities on the capitalist periphery where the bourgeois forms of the novel were never properly constituted.

In addition, if we take Jameson’s thesis seriously, it is necessary to recognize that the colonial question is one that is immanent to the avant-garde. This can be observed in the widespread presence of notions of primitivism in European movements such as Surrealism, Dadaism, and Cubism, which searched the colonies and capitalist periphery for a source of renewal for European culture. It can also be observed in Latin American contexts in the case of Anthropophagia and Indigenism, which highlighted autochthonous qualities in an effort to obtain a place in the world political and literary system. In this light, it is impossible to understand modernism and the avant-garde without a broad and globally-oriented Marxist analysis of the modernity that is at the root of these aesthetic movements. This would include the tensions between urban and rural spheres, between the market and more traditional modes of social organization, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between the colonies and the metropolis, and between that which capitalism, as a planetary system, defined as past and future. What is at stake, without the need to resort to simplistic arguments, is understanding a process of modernization that is, at the same time, a moment of dissolution for the realities of the nineteenth-century bourgeois social order. This can be understood as a perceived dissolution from the revolutionary point of view (as in the case of Russia), the reactionary point of view (as in the case of Italy) or the colonial point of view (as in the case of Latin America and other places on the capitalist periphery).

This argument in strengthened if we consider the history of manifestos. Martin Puchner suggests this line of study in his book Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Puchner’s thesis is that the avant-garde produced a new politico-literary genre: the manifesto. The political manifestos of the Socialist Internationals circulated alongside the artistic manifestos of the avant-garde movements, which were also international. The manifesto is the genre par excellence of this new moment in world literature given its propensity to combine political elements with the transnational character of the avant-garde.

According to Puchner, the manifesto as the form that is familiar to us today was invented by Marx and Engels in 1848, but it sprouted offshoots in movements such as Futurism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Creationism, and Indigenism, before finally reaching the avant-garde movements of the 1960s. If we take a heterodox approach to Lukács, ⁴⁴ we can assert that the manifesto is a form that is constructed in the wake of, and against, the bourgeoisie as they enter a period of decline. When the revolutionary potential of the bourgeoisie is exhausted, it is the moment in which the manifesto emerges as a new literary genre. As Puchner asserts, “[m]anifestos do not articulate a political unconscious that needs to be excavated through careful analysis as . . . in the case of the novel; rather, they seek to bring this unconscious into the open” (2). ⁴⁵ The history of manifestos, then, is related to the history of “isms” as revolutionary and collective models (or as counterrevolutionary models that were reactionary in orientation, such as proposals for Futurism, proposals for Fascism, and, as noted above, Salgado’s proposals for verde-amarelismo).

What interests us here in the context of discussing the Semana of 1922 and that Brazilian “ism,” Anthropophagia, is the essence, so to speak, of the manifesto as a genre: a form that emerges in the conflict between Old World and New and as “an instrument that gathers previous revolutionary events and channels them toward the immediate future, the imminent revolution” (21). ⁴⁶ It expresses something collective, even if it has been written by a small group or even a single person. In this way, the manifesto would have the traits of an artistic intervention, laden-down with theatricality and performativity. This means that, as a genre that flourishes alongside the avant-garde in both the center and periphery of the capitalist world system, the manifesto is a kind of membrane that enables an interaction between art and politics. ⁴⁷ The manifesto, then, would not simply be the vehicle for expressing modernism in its programmatic iterations, as Peter Bürger suggests, but instead would be the most proper expression of modernism itself. ⁴⁸

If we take this position seriously, we can see that the manifesto is a form that plays a primary role in the dialectic between art and politics in Brazilian modernism and in the formation of Anthropophagia as an “ism.” As Antonio Candido suggests, although the manifesto’s link with politics is not direct, there is, indeed, politics in the manifesto. The insights offered by Jameson and by Puchner, for their part, enable us to reconsider some aspects of the “Manifesto Antropófago” that are of interest to the ideas under analysis here. More specifically, these aspects include the tensions between nationalism and internationalism; the relationship between utopia and primitivism; the anti- or post-colonial elements in Oswald’s proposals and certain questions or concerns related to form. If we take these items under consideration, it will, perhaps, be possible to approach Anthropophagia as one of the many “isms” that were produced throughout the world in the 1920s as well as to understand its continued vitality in the present.

“Manifesto Antropófago:” Anthropophag(ism)?

As we have seen up to this point, it is possible to recognize the avant-garde manifestos as products of what we today describe as the processes of globalization. But not all these manifestos were internationalist in orientation. According to Puchner, transnational phenomena like varying modes of nationalism were intensified in the 1920s, especially given the conclusion of the First World War. ⁴⁹ Dadaism and Surrealism, which were both influenced by Rosa Luxemburg, were profoundly internationalist. In the least developed countries, which were required to confront the angst of establishing their national identity in this period, ⁵⁰ nationalist and ultranationalist tendencies were the most developed, something we see with the case of Futurism in Russia and Italy. But the situation is not as simple as it appears at first glance. Those tendencies and phenomena can crosspollinate.

In the “Manifesto Antropófago,” there is a series of elements that draw out what could be read in relation to the nationalist impulse. “Against” is the orienting word of the manifesto, and it provides the text with a certain cadence or rhythm. The word is repeated on numerous occasions:

This “against” is the mark of negation in the “Manifesto,” which has a series of rejections: the catechisms imposed on indigenous peoples by the process of colonization (and its significant symbolization in the priest Vieira); the sets of ideologies uncritically imported to the country; the vegetal elites (who, as Benedito Nunes notes, were the owners of the land) who copied those foreign models; the notion that humanity began in Europe at Cape Finisterre and that historical significance ascribed to the Western organizers of Rome and Napoleon; the neuroses produced by Catholic guilt and clothing, which were brought by the Portuguese; the Viscount of Cairú who contributed to the opening of Brazilian ports to nations friendly to Portugal, which accelerated colonial exploitation; the idealized image of the indigenous emblazoned in Baroque churches and in the literature of José de Alencar, with his foreign worldview producing the idea of the “noble savage;” the priest Anchieta writing in Latin from the beaches of Brazil (nothing could be more misplaced); bourgeois prejudices and the realities that Freud “cadasterated” or officially mapped out and registered (Oswald is playing with the word’s resonance with “castrated”).

That “against” is also accompanied by nationalist assertions of another sort: “[b]efore the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had already discovered happiness” (42) or “[w]e want the Carib Revolution. Greater than the French Revolution” (39), among others. ⁵³ But in general, the manifesto’s nationalism is marked by its resistance to foreign domination and the assertion that Brazil already had the utopias offered by European realities: “Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically” (1). ⁵⁴ Anthropophagia is the communicative vessel that places center and periphery into contact. The “Manifesto” is anti-imperialist in orientation without falling into an overexuberant nationalism in its negation of colonial submissiveness. It never articulates its anti-imperialism by defending the nationalist perspective in the ways that the “Manifesto Pau Brasil” or the “Manifesto do Verde-Amarelismo” openly advocate for an “affirmative nationalism . . . and nation building,” a natively flag-colored nationalism that is “green-yellow and Tupi.”

The internationalist character of the “Manifesto,” however, is more difficult to tease out because, unlike the case of Dadaism, where its internationalist tendencies are explicit, the “Manifesto Antropófago” appears tied to a notion of utopia that was very present in the Brazilian modernism. Its political dimensions, perhaps, reside in that space, as Benedito Nunes and Antonio Candido point out.

In the “Manifesto,” we can find two movements. The first, which is common to all avant-garde movements, whether they be European or Latin American, is the discovery of the so-called utopias of pre-modernity derived from the inspirations pulled from anthropology: primitivism. From here, we can see the idea that the solution to the crisis of Western civilization would be found in pre-modern societies. As noted above, the varying avant-garde movements shared in the view that European culture had reached a point of exhaustion and that, in the case of countries at the capitalist center, the search for renewal would take place in the colonies. Picasso worked to utilize so-called “arte negra” in his art (the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon takes inspiration from African masks); Rimbaud went to Egypt, Gauguin to Martinique, and Cendrars to Brazil. In that sense, it is possible to observe a clear anthropological inspiration in European modernism, marked by the inquiry into and research on that colonial other, which, without a doubt, sometimes resulted in exoticism and what we would today call cultural appropriation. It was a moment in which Anthropology itself, as a discipline, was just coming into being. Oswald de Andrade ironized this fact in the “Manifesto:” “the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study” (39). ⁵⁵ This demonstrates a clear awareness of the colonial character of this nascent discipline. Primitivism also manifested in formal aspects with the notion of artworks without adornment or decoration and artworks reduced to their most basic elements: lines, colors, shapes, etc. ⁵⁶

The second movement present in the “Manifesto” is characterized by what we would call today a postcolonial orientation. It provides a view of the dialectic between aesthetics and politics identified by Jameson, Puchner, and Candido. This would be the assertion that a primitivism based on Pre-Cabralian Brazil was not only already present in the country (and, for that reason, not something that would need to be sought out or searched for), ⁵⁷ but also that it shaped the utopias imagined in the modern world. That movement, which was often read as a nationalist aspect of the “Manifesto,” could not be more transnational in orientation. Oswald de Andrade incorporates European utopias into the history of processes of colonization: “[w]ithout us, Europe wouldn’t even have its meager declaration of the rights of man” (39); “We already had Communism. We already had Surrealist language” (40). ⁵⁸ And he orients the history of the Americas in the direction of utopia and revolution: “Heritage. Contact with the Carib side of Brazil. Où Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution and Keyserling’s technicized barbarian. We push onward” (39). ⁵⁹

This question—let’s call it the “postcolonial question,” for lack of a more proper or precise term—is usually developed along the lines of two interpretative principles. On the one hand, the “Manifesto” is read as the precursor of that which would be transformed into the “market of cultural difference,” in which Brazilian identity (a brasilidade) becomes a commodity. ⁶⁰ On the other hand, critics assert that it is necessary to release “Anthropophagia from the straight jacket of Brazilian identity” and to analyze it as “a theoretical paradigm for alterity” through its evocation of Amerindian thought. ⁶¹ If it is, in fact, true that Brazilian modernism was mobilized in just that way, as Roberto Schwarz demonstrates in his analysis of how Tropicália makes use of it—and that, on this point, demonstrates that it contained within it an anthropological perspective that was fairly advanced for its time, ⁶² —it is also true that the “Manifesto,” more than imitating foreign models, takes up the conflictual experience of colonial encounter in a mode that is fairly critical and made explicit in the primary moments of dialectical movement. In that sense, Oswald evokes the global dynamic of national and combined development. ⁶³

Anthropophagia is a metaphor that remains extremely relevant today. Anyone on the periphery of the capitalist system who has visited or experienced life in the so-called Global North will surely have noticed (with great surprise) the fact that Latin America is not considered part of Western society. On a visit to Brazil several years ago, a scholar with specialization on the Frankfurt School visiting from Germany expressed surprise and amazement at the absence of monkeys in the streets of São Paulo. Perspectives like these exist despite the concerted effort on the part of our intellectuals to speak foreign languages without an accent and to read the most celebrated authors, and notwithstanding the efforts of the Brazilian middle class to copy the social mores of the so-called American or European Way of Life. For the center, their imagined periphery is still, for the most part, saturated with what they understand as barbarism.

Oswald de Andrade mobilizes what, in certain ways, was the notion Europeans most clearly associated with the image of the Americas in the colonial era: the act of consuming human beings. If, on the one hand, anthropophagy serves as an allegory that elaborates the cultural conditions of the capitalist periphery (the mode in which the “Manifesto” was traditionally read), it also contains a certain level of irony: it shows that without those so-called barbarous cannibals, Europe wouldn’t have its utopias. This irony, if you will, is all the more evocative in that it is an essential part of contemporary critical thought developed from a global point of view. Oswald emphasizes that the indigenous communities of the Americas provided an imaginary that served as a resource for Europe’s moral universe and also in its economic thought (societies that were not based on private property and the resulting inequality, etc.). These, in turn, expanded the utopian political imaginings of the Western world. ⁶⁴ That Oswald de Andrade was a member of the elite, guided by an almost naïve intention to engage in cultural exchange as a member of the chorus of nations, matters little here, given that art is not only what its author attempted to create but also an independent entity, expressed in a form that engages on its own terms with each historical era. In the contemporary moment, with the obvious and growing resurgence of xenophobic and racist iterations of nationalism, this question is once again the order of the day. If the idea of formation or development long ago ceased to be a viable option for the Third World, the colonial dynamics, now reinvigorated, nonetheless persist.

In addition to these dynamics, anthropophagy was a recurrent subject for modernism, appearing across a range of forms and articulating both positive and negative points of view in works by authors ranging from Picabia to Lu Xun. ⁶⁵ Brazilian Anthropophagia was, for its part, more than a mere capitulation to a supposed “market of cultural difference,” which continually located Brazil in a perpetual place of totalized otherness. It made a mockery of that project. The anthropophagus absorbs what is eaten, and in so doing, calls into question any possibility of radical otherness in relation to European culture. The “Manifesto” seeks to bring into focus the relationship between center and periphery. If, on the one hand, Oswald’s motivation was the need for a kind of recognition of Brazilian culture, on the other, it was a need that was not reducible to the problem of national identity. This becomes clear in the battle of the “isms” that the differences between Anthropophagia and Verde-Amarelismo bring into focus. In the contemporary moment, a kind of overexuberant nationalism has returned thanks to new proposals for national cohesiveness, where indigenous populations are meant to be absorbed and incorporated through blind nationalism that is, of course, profoundly identitarian and homogenizing in nature.

In the “Manifesto Nhegaçu Verde-Amarelo,” published in 1929 in Correio Paulistano, Plínio Salgado, Menotti del Picchia, and their fellow conservatives develop a dividing line that created value judgments regarding two contrasting indigenous groups: the Tupi and the Tapuia, the latter being the name given to enemy groups in Tupi-Guarani. This latter group, the Tapuia, “isolated themselves in the jungle to survive; and they were killed by the firearms and arrows of their enemies. The Tupi engaged in socialization without fear of death, and they ended up surviving in the blood of our race. The Tapuia are dead but the Tupi are alive” (180). ⁶⁶ Verde-Amarelismo dispenses with any allegorical or ironizing approach to Anthropophagia in order to return to the Romantic imaginary of the “noble savage” developed in the work of José de Alencar. Contained within the assertions of Verde-Amarelismo is the notion of a national identity built from the blood of the good or upstanding indigenous peoples who were able to adapt: “The Tupi descended [from the highlands] to be absorbed. To be dissolved into the blood of a new people” (181). ⁶⁷ There is a racial dimension here, with the focus on the flow of blood, that is absent in the “Manifesto Antropófago,” in which neither the word “race” (which does have a presence in the “Manifesto Pau Brasil”) nor the word “nation” appear. For the verde-amarelos, Anthropophagia (as associated with the Tapuias) is a kind of Jacobinism.

Their manifestos also differ at the level of form. The “Manifesto Nhegaçu Verde-Amarelo” relies on traditional prose, but the “Manifesto Antropófago” incorporates a modernist aesthetic. As Jorge Schwartz has noted, one of the great achievements of 1922 was the introduction of colloquial language into poetry (70). ⁶⁸ And Oswald de Andrade’s work was characterized, in that sense, by a persistent effort to break the boundaries between poetry and prose by accessing a sort of common resource built into all modes of artistic language (113). ⁶⁹ The use of the language of the poor and working class runs the risk of falling into a kind of populism, as Candido suggests in the essay cited above, or into a kind of condescension that creates the appearance, as Roberto Schwarz has argued, that the end result of processes of oppression and expropriation are actually positive aspects of social life. ⁷⁰ And yet, in colonized countries like Brazil, this technique served as a tentative distancing mechanism that separated the country from the language and grammar imposed by the colonizer.

The same idea is equally valid when considering the role of free verse (in opposition to the Parnassian sonnet) given its affinity with the realities of life on the capitalist periphery and the sonnet’s historical links with socially regimented contexts. ⁷¹ Free verse, from the historical perspective, was attendant to the exigencies of movement and transformation inherent in the manifesto as form and served as the proposition for a radical transformation of society, whether that be in the direction of development, technology, urbanization, and utopia; or whether it be in the direction of dissolving everything that is solid, the emergence of contradictory social realities in the urban sphere, and the arrival of technological dystopias. Both tendencies are present in the work of Oswald de Andrade.

In that sense, the “Manifesto” follows the aesthetic program outlined by Mário de Andrade in his “Prefácio interessantíssimo,” which is also a manifesto as Jorge Schwartz defines them. There, Mário proposes the substitution of the harmonic structures of poetry for standard melodic structures, thus creating a form in which words, superimposed one on the other, no longer maintain an immediate relationship between them: “Trances... Struggles... Arrows Pointing the Way... Songs... Populate!” (152). ⁷² The goal, Mário asserts, is to put words into place in anticipation of a sentence that will give them a meaning that “DOES NOT COME” ⁷³ and of isolated fragments with no immediate relation between them. That element of “disorientation” ⁷⁴ will also be deeply embedded in the other manifestos that Oswald writes, with all their numerous variations. The use of the word “caminhamos,” or, “we are walking” (“we push onward” (Bary)/“we go” (Oiticica)) and the word “antropofagia” (“cannibalism” (Bary)/”anthropophagy” (Oiticica)), which run throughout the “Manifesto Antropófago,” are examples of the “disorienting” element. ⁷⁵ Those words appear in an isolated way, normally in the middle or at the end of a sentence or phrase. Oswald also appeals to the technique of disjointed groupings of phrases that, at first glance, seem disconnected: “[f]rom William James to Voronoff. The transfiguration of the Taboo into a totem. [Anthropophagy]” (42). ⁷⁶

Polyphonic poetry, written in free verse, is oriented toward the self-aware performative intention characterizing the manifesto, toward the idea of an “agile theater, child of the acrobat. Agile and illogical. Agile novel, born of invention. Agile poetry” (184). ⁷⁷ This dimension of the manifestos also leads to the incorporation of shock, which in Oswald’s writing always appears through an appeal to morality or to technology.

One of the primary influences for Anthropophagia is Freud, who was present in other “isms” such as Surrealism and Dadaism, and whom both Mário and Oswald de Andrade had read. While in Surrealism the notion of the subconscious was central (notably at the level of form, such as with automatic writing), Anthropophagia was motivated by the desire to fell repression and to liberate the drives, not only by overcoming the feelings of inferiority endemic to the capitalist periphery, as Candido has suggested, ⁷⁸ but also and primarily by overcoming the moral constraints of bourgeois societies in the West. ⁷⁹ Oswald affirms toward the beginning of the “Manifesto” the following: “[w]e’re tired of all the suspicious Catholic husbands who’ve been given starring roles. Freud put an end to the mystery of Woman and to other horrors of printed psychology” (38). ⁸⁰ We discover in the manifesto of Pau Brasil poetry, the word “dandruff” (caspa): “[i]n every home housing a young woman there also dwells an artist. The photographic camera made its appearance. And with all the prerogatives of those with long hair, dandruff, and a gaze casting a mysterious originality, the artist-photographer” (168). ⁸¹ Further on in the “Manifesto Antropófago,” Oswald states: “[t]he paterfamilias and the creation of the Morality of the Stork: Real ignorance of things + lack of imagination + sense of authority in the face of curious offspring” (42). ⁸² It is worth noting here that shock is also produced at the formal level. Oswald’s verse lacks the standard quantitative meter in favor of the icon “+” and mathematics as a thematic element: “Death and life of all hypotheses. From the equation ‘Self, part of the Cosmos’ to the axiom ‘Cosmos, part of the Self.’ Subsistence. Experience. [Anthropophagy]” (40). ⁸³ The same idea is evident in “[j]oy is the proof by nines” (43). ⁸⁴ Religion is vehemently attacked in the text as the origin point for all that is repressive: the patriarchy, morality, catechism, guilt.

This element, which is Baudelaire-like in its introduction of the profane and the crude into poetry, contributes to the manifesto’s goal of sending a shock to the moral convictions of the present. The sexual dimension of Anthropophagia was still, as the “Manifesto” makes clear, the domain of the elite, and it is a central component of the novels that Mário and Oswald de Andrade wrote. It also had a role in later moments in their work. Sábato Magaldi asserts that Procópio Ferreira lamented the fact that it wasn’t possible to stage Oswald’s O Rei da Vela in the 1930s because the word “mistress,” which appears in the work, had been prohibited by the censors. ⁸⁵ That sexual aspect of their work, however, was also accompanied by a critique of a society organized around labor. In both Oswald and Mário de Andrade, there is a defense of idleness, which is a central component of Anthropophagia.

The shock the “Manifesto” produces is moral in nature, but it is also allied with technology as a key component of modernity. In Mário de Andrade’s Pauliceia Desvairada, one of the central lines of inquiry is the experience of the modern urban metropolis. Similarly, in “Manifesto da poesia Pau Brasil,” Oswald writes “Wagner is before the carnival lines of Botafogo” (184); poetry emerges amid “the green of the Favela” (184); advertisements produce “letters bigger than towers. And new forms of industry, of transportation, of aviation. Gas stations. Gas meters. Railways. Laboratories and technical workshops. Voices and tics of wires and waves and flashes” (186). ⁸⁶ What we see in this passage, in addition to its status as a prime example of polyphonic poetry, is its use of prosopopoeia: the varying threads comprising the city all have a voice. They are the music of an urban chorus.

Here, it is worth remembering that prosopopoeia is the narrative language of animism. In Macunaíma, this is beautifully illustrated in the sequence in which the origin of the automobile is explained through the myth of the jaguar. In the “Manifesto Antropófago,” technology is taken up, not in the direct context of the urban metropolis but instead through the more modest figure of “Keyserling’s technicized barbarian” (39). ⁸⁷ Keyserling associated the expansion of technology and bureaucracy with the emergence of new forms of tribalism, and he critiqued the formation of what would later be known as technocracy. Oswald inverts Keyserling’s theory, making it a positive element. This amounts to a defense of the alliance between primitivism and science: “[t]he determination of progress by catalogues and television sets. Only machinery. And blood transfusers” (41). ⁸⁸ Along with television sets, “American movies will inform us” (38). ⁸⁹ If the shock that the “Manifesto” sought to produce in the area of morality comes under the sign of negation, from the point of view of technology, it is utopian and constructive: there is an enthusiasm for technological progress that will be placed into significant doubt in subsequent decades. In Marco Zero II (1946), Oswald associates Anthropophagia with Hitler and with the technicized barbarian. ⁹⁰

Oswald’s poetry is allegorical, associative, but never symbolic. And, through a procedure that operates as a kind of montage, the “Manifesto” combines historical facts, poetry, and references to ethnography, psychoanalysis, and politics. In that sense, an understanding of the ironic nature of Anthropophagia is required for us to be able to grasp its critical approach to colonialism. Anthropophagia is an “ism” in which the shock of colonial realities that permeate the artistic avant-garde movements is consciously brought to the surface and into view.

Its appeal to colloquial language and what we might call its aphoristic nature brings with it a clear aim to intervene directly in everyday life by evoking reality and shaping public taste. In that sense, the “Manifesto” is itself anthropophagic (not cannibalistic) in that it constructs itself on the premise of devouring all genres, theories, and histories. The “Manifesto” produces in form (and in its self-declared status as “Anthropophagus”) one of the primary characteristics of the avant-garde: the radical mixture of artforms and genres.

In Defense of the “Isms”

One of the problems that emerges from the impulse to reduce manifestos to their programmatic function in modernism is, as Puchner has argued, the resulting tendency to disregard their status as an avant-garde genre in their own right. This is the reason why Oswald de Andrade has generally been received as the great provocateur of Brazilian modernism and as an undisciplined prankster, as if all we had before us was mere propaganda for the modernist movement. It is true that there are associations between the avant-garde and propaganda, which are complex. But many critics have simply concluded that Oswald lacked any systematic formulation, in contrast to Mário de Andrade, who had developed a more cohesive artistic program within Brazilian modernism. However, is systematic formulation a relevant category for the “isms?” Do we generally level these critiques at Dadaism or Surrealism? Is it not the case that provocation is a key element of the manifesto as genre? Is it not the case that it is precisely through provocation that politics and art maintain their interaction within avant-garde movements? When we see the “Manifesto Antropófago” as a specific figuration of a transnationally constructed genre and Anthropophagia as an “ism” in which Mário de Andrade, Tarsila, and many others would be included, we open up a new perspective on it.

The goal here is not to negate what Brazilian literary criticism has advanced up to this point and to discard the reading of Anthropophagia as a theorization of Brazil and its national cultural life. Instead, the goal is to reposition it within the terms of the world system. In so doing, we will be better able to understand the organizing mechanisms and aesthetic interests under debate here, which, in turn, strengthen the longevity of the avant-garde and the study of it in Brazil. At the same time, the “isms” and the avant-garde movements, because of their undeniable origin point in socialist politics, which was sometimes more and sometimes less explicit, exist in contradictory relationship with the political avant-garde (or revolutionary politics). The “isms” lose their function in the context of political revolution, as Adorno has demonstrated, and they run the risk of being transformed into a kind of conformism or desire for order if they are converted into an artistic tradition. ⁹¹ So, how can we avoid the nostalgic take on the 1920s without, at the same time, omitting the modernist movement and its sense of that era? And how can we confront the dilemma Brecht once proposed in which we reject the “bad new days” without desiring the “good old ones” (53)? ⁹²

The fact that the 1920s do not evoke nostalgia in Brazil perhaps provides an advantage in relation to the European case. Some statues have been burned and some severed heads have rolled. But the modernist spirit remains vibrant amid artists’ convictions regarding change, critique and the transformation of the legacy of the Semana as well as in the variant modes of modernism they inspired and created, which continue to be debated today. It very well may be that this debate is the movement’s greatest legacy. At the end of the day, there is nothing more contrary to Brazilian modernism than the transformation of its works and, above all its authors, into a canon.

There are various aspects of Anthropophagia and Brazilian modernism that have not aged well, if they weren’t already fossils in their own era. We do not seek “the matriarchy of Pindorama” (43), ⁹³ but instead a society in which gender no longer serves as a criterion for hierarchies. We do not seek to recover the technicized barbarian now that we know how that figure transforms amid the use of social media. We do not seek Anthropophagia nor art in broader terms to be concentrated in the hands of a vegetal elite (even a modernist one). But we do need the avant-garde’s experimentalist, utopian, iconoclastic, critical, international, and transnational impulses in a world in which extremist elements on the political right spread across international borders. There is a wide range of countries across the world that run the risk of being overrun by homogenizing movements for national identity in which imperialism is more vibrant than ever. Racist and xenophobic currents continue their expansion, and it is continually more difficult to critique religion and bourgeois moral codes, even within politically progressive circles. In Brazil, Indigenous communities and their cultures are among the most persecuted groups by the extreme right.

Modernism, often accused of merely being an art of linguistic experimentation, demonstrated the conservative power of grammar. It opened up a space for scrutinizing how grammar not only sustains norms of educated language use but also presupposes a colonial order and a class structure that ensures that the control of that order remains in the hands of the few. In that period, challenging the norms of educated language use was synonymous with challenging the future of Brazil as a culturally independent country. In the contemporary context, debates about gender inclusive language in the country confront similar obstacles. The mistaken idea that grammar is not determined by its relation to the reigning structure of power is one that continues today, and this mistaken, hegemonic understanding of grammar is not limited to the extreme right.

There is one last additional aspect of the avant-garde movements that can be of great assistance in today’s world. The culture industry seems to have reached its greatest level of hegemony, finally achieving, though in an inverted way, what has long been its dream: a global, internationalized culture. It achieves this through the conviction that art produces its audience rather than simply reflecting it or responding to its demands. The modernist project should be democratized, but it cannot renounce the performative and formative nature of its art in a moment in which the passive consumption of culture is paralleled in a political passivity that is at the core of the recent rise of the extreme right.

In his defense of the “isms,” Adorno asserted that, in these movements, individual works of art reject the dynamics of individuation that sustained bourgeois art and instead include themselves in a collective movement. Perhaps because of this, and perhaps also because they are always guided by the idea of the “new,” their works are always works in progress. They have this status not because they are poorly executed or unfinished but instead because they are open. Routes. The aesthetic and political openness of avant-garde works of art speak to the present. In that sense, we do need to change grammar, bring catechisms to an end, renew poetry, and defend the “isms” that matter most.

This article was originally published as “Aquellos años veinte en Brasil: Good Old Days or Bad New Ones?,” Revista Chilena de Literatura 106 (2022): 285-316. Please consult the original Spanish-language version of the article (translated from the Portuguese by Rebecca Errázuriz) at the following link: https://revistaliteratura.uchi....

Bruna Della Torre is a research area coordinator at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies, Heidelberg University. In 2023, she was awarded a Horkheimer Fellowship at the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. She was a teaching post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at Universidade de São Paulo, as well as at the Sociology Department at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, and a visiting scholar at Duke University, Humboldt Universität, Akademie der Künst, and Goethe Universität, as well as a Lecturer at Universidade de Brasília. Bruna’s work appeared in Rethinking Marxism, Cultural Dynamics, Mediations: Journal of The Marxist Literary Group, Revista Chilena de Literatura, Latin American Perspectives, Meridional. Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos, Pandaemonium Germanicum, among others. She is the author of the book Vanguarda do atraso ou Atraso da Vanguarda? Oswald de Andrade e os teimosos destinos do Brasil.