post-colonial_translation

Harold ode Campos’ poetics of transcreation 99
declaration of the rights of man’. Again, through a reading of history
from a reverse angle, the Christian missionaries who are traditionally
said to have gone to Brazil to save the population are recast in the
Manifesto as runaways from a civilization Brazilians are now, in turn,
dissecting. The reversal of history culminates in the date of composition
of the Manifesto. Contradicting both the Christian calendar and
orthodox historiography that sets the year 1500 as the discovery and
origin of Brazil, Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto is dated in the 374th
year of the ritual devouring of a Portuguese bishop which,
metaphorically, marks the synthesis of the European and autochthonous
elements, signposting the emergence of Brazilian culture.
ANTROPOFAGIA REVISITED
Having briefly demonstrated how the digestive metaphor was initially
used in Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto of the 1920s irreverently to
present a non-Eurocentric historiography, I now move from what
Spivak calls ‘strategic essentialism’ to a brief survey of the more recent
revitalization of the digestive metaphor in the 1960s and 1970s. A web
of narratives and social reports will be shown to theorize metaphorically
the tension between world culture and the identity of a peripheral
national literature within the complex interplay of neo-colonialism and
transnationalization in the Third World, a term that came to be applied
to post-colonial countries and which brought a heightened awareness
of hierarchy and underdevelopment. Segments of Brazilian cultural
production, including literature, cinema, popular music and the
discourse of criticism might be seen as having incorporated such new
sensitivities, at times returning to the view of a non-contaminated
culture, at others asserting identity via the appropriation and recycling
of the world’s cultural objects.
In this context, Johnson’s study of the re-emergence and reevaluation
of Antropofagia, from which I select three examples, is illuminating in
that it includes several forms of rewriting. In 1967, Oswald de Andrade’s
play O Rei da Vela, a virulent critique of capitalism, economic
dependency and authoritarianism, was staged and recreated, among
other things, as a radical critique of the economic and political model
imposed by the regime following the 1964 Revolution. Two years later,
Joaquim Pedro de Andrade adapted Macunaíma, a novel of the 1920s
associated with Antropofagia, into a film, where the image of
cannibalism is used to criticize Brazil’s savage capitalism and the
country’s relations of dependency on advanced industrial powers. The