Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Anthropophagy, Invention, and the Objectification of Brazil

1999; Volume: 12; Issue: 23-24 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ntc.1999.0001

1940-9079

Roland Greene,

Memory, Trauma, and Testimony

ANTHROPOPHAGE ????????, AND THE OBJECTIFICAnON OF BRAZIL ____________________ROLAND GREENE____________________ University of Oregon Anthropophagy—invention—objectification. In their largely unexplored relation to each other, these terms are among the elements of the decisive revolution in Brazilian letters that began in 1922 with the Semana de Arte Moderna. From that event to its continuations in Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto da poesia Pau-Brasil of 1924 and Manifesto antropófago of 1928, and its antitypes in the concrete poetry movement of the 1950s and the Tropicalism of the 1960s, not to mention more recent renovations, the first two of these terms are invoked, exploited and persistently mystified. In fact, their efficacy in sloganeering may depend on their mystification. Considered in context, however, these three terms are linked in a métonymie relation in which each lends meaning to, and casts a critical perspective on, the others. Objectification is the largest of them, the ideological condition that frames much of Brazilian discourse and experience since the colonial period; invention , a concept of early modern humanism, has a particular urgency in the making of Brazil owing to the background of objectification, and often surfaces as a powerful through unexamined trope in Brazilian thought; and anthropophagy, of course, represents Oswald's attempt to reframe the other two terms for modernist purposes. Invention stands behind anthropophagy, I would argue, as a prior and enabling term, and objectification in turn stands behind invention —each one points to, and reflects on, the others. Together these terms belong not only to the lexicon of Brazilian modernism, but to the much longer historical context that follows the colonial origins of Brazilian identity and recognizes modernism as only one among a number of critical episodes. In what follows, I propose to situate these terms schematically in that extended context. If Pau-Brasil, Antropófago, and other programs of the early twentieth century are still determined by objectification, they also share an interest in keeping that condition implicit, since its acknowledgment makes them appear more epigones than autonomous movements, and perhaps makes Brazilian culture seem contained by its colonial backstory even more than the agents of cultural independence would want it to©1999 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XII No. 23/24, Enero a Diciembre 1999 116_____________________________________________________ROLAND GREENE be. Oswald's two major manifestos are chapters in a coming to terms with the early modern foundations of Brazilian society, they disclose stages in his taking of a position in relation to that colonial history. They can scarcely be understood outside their early modern lexicon, for they represent the finale of a Renaissance event of culture-building as much as the beginning of cultural independence. They ought to be seen, I believe, in both perspectives. Let me begin by proposing in brief what I develop elsewhere at length: the premise that Brazilian culture is formed in a drama of objectification, in which the colonial anecdote that elsewhere features Columbus, Cortés, and their like is adapted to a world of things, and in which objects such as paubrasil and the other original commodities of the Brazilian colony are the protagonists. What is objectification, and how does it prepare the way for modernism? All of the Euro-American imperialisms, of course, were deeply concerned with objects in one fashion or another. In the case of Brazil, however, several factors come together to make objects into the central figures in the colonial episode. These factors include what was depicted since 1500 as the corporate, nonheroic character of the Brazilian discovery; the experience of the Portuguese trading class with the emergent notion of fetishism, which William Pietz has traced to Luso-African trade on the Upper Guinea coast in the years immediately preceding the discovery of Brazil; the mercantile basis of the Brazilian enterprise; the narrative discretions of the semi-anonymous Pero Vaz de Caminha; and the received history of the commodity of pau-brasil itself, which joins legendary, superstitious , and commercial motives into a single product that carries more import than any historical agent. The drama of objectification is the unfolding story of how objects such as pau-brasil come to be invested with meaning, how those objects are seen to embody the place Brazil, and how...