The Debate on Cultural Dependence in Brazil

Abstract

A complex concept of cultural dependence unfolds itself as Brazilian critical discourses of the 1970s reread certain significant moments of the country's history. One of the segments of this discourse re-evaluates the nineteenth century post-independence meditation on cultural inferiority and lack of a cultural tradition. Another segment, whose strategies to break with European models this essay highlights, looks back to Modernism in the 1920s, upon the occasion of the centenary of the nation's political independence. Cultural dependence also finds an expression in the theoretical position taken by intellectuals vis-À-vis underdevelopment and backwardness in Brazil as from the 1950s; in the same decade, the Concretist Movement further incorporates into the debate the problematic connections between underdevelopment, economic dependence and the production of an avant-garde literature. In the 1960s, the complex link between underdevelopment and artistic production reappears in the theorization of the specificity of the cinema in peripheral cultures. Against the background of projects of modernization and the discourse of transculturation, the metaphors of critical discourse, especially the organic, spatial, temporal, and food metaphors, reveal two basic attitudes towards cultural dependence: an expression of cultural malaise and a ludic attempt to overcome it.