Abstract
In 1927, Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade encountered in the Amazon a perceptual state provoked by malaria. The malarial gaze was a type of enduring, inactive, and embodied gaze that he imagines as a mode of resistance against capitalist modernity – a trope that finds its way into the critical discourse on national identity. Dialoguing with film theory and queer phenomenology, the article closely reads three scenes of looking in Andrade’s Amazonian photographs and travel notes, in which such a perceptual state is evoked and unravels a processual entanglement between capitalist modernity, the Amazon, and the modernist subject. The article shows how the inactive malarial gaze emerges through a mediated queer experience of the filmic image that gets suppressed in favour of a pure immediacy of the tropics, arguing that at the core of Andrade’s ambivalent politics of looking lies the problem of the impossibility of a “critical” national project. Fleshing out the political potentialities held by perception, the author suggests through Mário de Andrade a film-political constellation to understand the critical stakes of being an inactive spectator in the (geo)politics of extractive, peripheral capitalism.
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