Situating Antropofagia in Empire

Several 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, São Paulo natives Oswald de Andrade and Mário 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 São Paulo in February of 1922 commemorating the centennial of Brazil's independence by showcasing contemporary art forms.

Carlos A. Jáuregui'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 Jáuregui'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.