Abstract
In Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ of 1928, he explicitly calls for Brazilian and Latin American artists to resist the vestiges of colonial cultural politics by appropriating the cannibal trope and unabashedly plundering and consuming the European cultural tradition to radically rewrite cultural discourse. While Andrade’s Manifesto has been used as a critical lens to examine the Latin American avant-gardes, as well as other modes of post-colonial cultural production, it has not been as widely used as a theoretical apparatus for examining the question of commodity production and consumption. In this paper, I revisit the Manifesto by focusing on its critical dialogue with Marx’s concept of the fetish of the commodity. Linking this fetish with Apparadurai’s recent thinking on the fetishism of the consumer, I trace how cannibalism can be reworked as a mode of ‘profanation,’ to use Agamben’s terms, of the power apparatuses of consumption itself. Then I test the concept of the profanation of consumption with two film case studies - Nelson Perreira dos Santos’ Como era gostoso o meu francês (dos Santos,1971) and Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocausto (Deodato, 1980). My readings situate these films in their cultural and political contexts and read them as texts which profane the apparatuses of the construction of historical and spectacular images for global consumption.
Highlights
Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ (‘Anthropophagist Manifesto,’ the MA) is a text which continues to both animate and confound contemporary theoretical debates over the critical valence of the figure of the cannibal
The reification of cannibalism as a indigenous mechanism of accessing forgotten ancient knowledge is complicit in the elision of the discourse of the legacy of slavery, especially when conceived as the perverse extension of commodification to human beings. By avoiding this tendency to reify the aspects of cannibalism which relate to the recuperation of indigenous culture, we can reincorporate a vision of anthropophagy which properly accounts for the fetishes of the commodity and the consumer in discursive constructions of modernity
In Nelson Perreira dos Santos’ Como era gostoso o meu francês, this framework lends itself to a reading of the encroachment of capitalist commodity production and consumption on the idealised depictions of pre-modern pasts, defetishizing our relationship to the apparatuses of history and the construction of historical truth through self-referential distortions of historical truth claims
Summary
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