Abstract
Oswaldo Costa was a key member of the Brazilian modernist Antropofagia (Anthropophagy) movement of the late 1920s, yet he has been largely forgotten by critics and marginalized from national cultural history. Costa articulated —as no other member of the movement did, including his famous leader Oswald de Andrade— an Antropofagia intellectually engaged in what we call a cannibal critique of colonial modernity and Occidentalism. Costa’s Antropofagia cannibalized the historical archive, reading against the grain of a triumphant Western imperial history. Throughout his contributions to the Revista de Antropofagia , he questioned Brazil’s cultural allegiance to Europe, pointed out the existence of asynchronous temporalities within Brazil, and defied Eurocentric notions of civilization and progress that ideologically structure Brazilian nationalism in the ninetieth and twentieth centuries. He also enacted an anthropophagous re-reading of Brazilian historiography against its celebration of colonialism and proposed the necessity of a cultural decolonization. This article analyzes Costa’s principal contributions to Antropofagia and rescues his hitherto overlooked countercolonial thought from the oblivion of collective forgetting. Moreover, it examines Costa’s significant view of Brazilian modernity as a perfidious armistice with other barbarous temporalities, and of the Westernization of Brazil as a deceptive appearance that hides ever-present colonial antagonisms.
Highlights
RESUMEN: Oswaldo Costa, Antropofagia, y la crítica caníbal de la modernidad colonial.- Oswaldo Costa fue un miembro fundamental del movimiento modernista Antropofagia de finales de la década de 1920
Antônio Cândido rightly indicated that “it is difficult to say what exactly Antropofagia is, since Oswald never formulated it, he left enough elements to see some virtual principles beneath the aphorisms” we find in his famous manifesto (1970: 84–85)
A few of those often-enigmatic surrealist aphorisms usually suffice to allege that Antropofagia offered a syncretic model for cultural encounters similar to transculturación,3 that it anticipated contemporary debates on hybridity, or that it attempted a cultural decolonization and “proposed” the creative consumption of European cultural capital in order to produce a national culture beyond the anxieties of influence
Summary
RESUMEN: Oswaldo Costa, Antropofagia, y la crítica caníbal de la modernidad colonial.- Oswaldo Costa fue un miembro fundamental del movimiento modernista Antropofagia de finales de la década de 1920. The Brazilian modernist Antropofagia (Anthropophagy) movement —developed in the late 1920s by Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) and others in the Revista de Antropofagia (1928-1929) and represented by Oswald’s iconic “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928)— is a central reference in Latin American cultural history.
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