0132 Antropofagia: An Early Arrière-Garde Manifestation in 1920s Brazil

Abstract

By re-evaluating the anthropophagic understanding of the cannibal's alterity, this paper proposes Antropofagia as driven by a collaborative cosmopolitanism. It shows how Antropofagia antagonised the status quo of the Brazilian academies, broaching its commitment to national issues on the ethno-racial structure and the cultural identity of a young Republic. Antropofagia anticipates Frampton's ideas on Western post-modern stances, undermining the Eurocentric narrative on the succession of, and difference between, modernism and post-modernism. As a sophisticated Arrière-Garde that not only tackled universal civilisation from without, but also from within, Antropofagia emancipated Brazilian cultural production in relation to that of the centre for it problematized, within a post-colonial reality, cultural and political burdens as heavy as those inherent to the local-global relation.