Three Glad Races: Primitivism and Ethnicity

in Brazilian Modernist Literature

K. David Jackson

Joy is the proof by nines.

MOOEilNISM I modernity
-Oswald de Andrade, "Cannibal Manifesto"
VOLUME ONE. ISSUE TWO,

December 24, midnight-Christmas dinner. The PP 89-112. © 1994 THE

European tradition was imitated in everything: the JOHNS HOPKINS

music, the large illuminated pine tree adoming the UNIVERSITY PllESS

back o f the drawing room and even in certain

delicacies: chestnuts, dates, apricots. This lack of
authenticity irks the purists o f customs, who demand
a tropical expression o f the Christmas celebrations. I
don't know whether they're right and if a substitution
is really possible. I'm inclined to believe that ali this
might even be more powerful, here, than in its
countries of origin.
-Osman Lins, The Queen of the Prisons of
Greece 1
K. David jackson is
Professor of Portu-
guese Language and
Literature at Yale
Antropofagia (cannibalism), an iconoclastic movement within University. His books
Brazilian literary modernism, drew upon the theme of can- include Sing Without
nibalism as a central motif for its theoretical and artistic Shame: Oral Traditions
in lndo-Portuguese
program in the insouciant Revista de Antropofagia (Canni-
Creole Verse and
bal Magazine) (1928-29); its principal figures, the writer-in- Vanguardism in Latin
tellectual Oswald de Andrade ( 1890-1954) and the painter American Uterature: An
Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), have long been recognized Annotated Bibliographical
as powerful artists of major significance and international Guide. His essays on
Brazilian modernism
status. Brazilian cannibalism created one of the most inno-
include the afterword
vative theories to be derived from the modernist fascination to Patrícia Galvão's
with the primitive, 2 and "":as characterized by its mocking newly released novel,
appropriation, inversion, and local application of European Industrial Park.

11
 M O D E R N I S M I modernity
90 models, among them the rhetoric of manifestos and the primitivist discoveries of
the European avant-gardes, both transposed to the spaces and races of Brazil's
vast interior. Antropofagia exploits its avant-garde posture to address the
question of Latin American cultural autonomy in dialogue with the primitivism
then attracting attention in Europe. Vitally engaged with the question of Latin
American cultural autonomy, Antropofagia was a bold, provocative, if also
ambiguous, attempt to respond to the conflicting imperatives of cultural
nationalism and pluralist cosmopolitanism in a post-colonial context. Yet ever
since the movement was first formed in the late 1920s, and continuing to the
present, their work has been repeatedly taxed with charges of impurity and
inauthenticity, with being essentially a derivative imitation of the European
avant-gardes and lacking genuine roots in the soil of Brazilian culture. Moreover,
since the revival of interest in "cannibalism" in the 1960s, antropofagia has been
accused of failing to offer a cultural program with serious social or political con-
sequences for Brazil, a charge that indirectly reinforces the earlier complaints
about cosmopolitan uprootedness. While these claims usefully acknowledge cer-
tain limitations inherent in antropofagia from the beginning, they also slight the
genuine ambivalence of the movement's responses to European culture and ne-
glect the complexity of the Brazilian socio-cultural setting in which that re-
sponse was formulated. The choice that faced the cannibalists was not so much
between imported art and indigenous practice, or between cultural colonialism
and native resistance, but between one version of nationalism, itself already
saturated with European notions of the telluric and soon to prove all too ame-
nable to the spurious nationalism of the Vargas regime, and another more nu-
anced sense of cultural autonomy that explored the cross-relationship of primi-
tive Brazil with modernist Europe. 3 Antropofagia owed little to ideas of recover-
ing a lost authenticity and instead adopted a more self-reflective and theoretical
concept of national identity as constructed difference. Largely forgotten, or even
studiously neglected by official cultural authorities in Brazil, this notion of iden-
tity may prove to be a strategy of enduring value. Moreover, it may also help us
reconsider the increasingly reductive dichotomy between European derivatives
and indigenous authenticity. In the fractured world of post colonialism, the
choice is not between purity and its opposite, but between competing kinds of
impurity whose values are inseparable from settings and circumstances.
To be sure, the origins of antropofagia are inseparable from contemporary
European fascination with the primitive .. One of the cruciallessons the Brazilians
learn from the Parisian movements is how to value the ethnic diversity and racial
heterogeneity that would allow Brazil to claim a primitivism of its own. The
modernists from São Paulo assert the primacy and superiority of man and nature
in the N ew World, in a reversal o f nineteenth-century ide as about race and
climate. Their position is strengthened from their Parisian vantage point, where
Amaral's studio is a center of euphoria and exoticism in the world of primitive art
in the 1920s. 4 Surveying Brazil from their urban and erudite perspective, they
come to equate indigenism, folklore, and ethnicity with an authentic national
 JA c K s o N 1 three glad races
91
cultural definition. Although not indigenous or folkloric themselves, the artists
find it natural to incorporate indigenous and folkloric themes into their works
and to claim them as their own, as equally valid representations of Brazilian
reality. In Paris, the Brazilian artists appropriate the expressive qualities of
European primitivism and arl negre, and especially the themes of excess and
appetite that they recognize as apt for Brazil. They use the forms provided by the
plastic arts, the manifesto, Freudian theory, and primitivist ethnology aestheti-
cally to model these themes into their own "primary materiais." Through a calcu-
lated reformulation of these common forms and themes, the Brazilians place
themselves in a position both to rewrite their national history and to cast them-
selves as the rejuvenated descendants of the "sad races"-a term popularized by
poet Olavo Bilac that reflects the late nineteenth-century social Darwinist and
racialist theories of inferiority that had been applied to Brazil's non-European
and multiracial population. Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de Andrade embody
the modernists' counterconception of racial diversity as strength in the figure of
the cannibal who sits at the origin of natural philosophies, perfectly in harmony
with them. 5
Antropofagia will be described here in terms of avant-garde aesthetics as an
avenue to postcolonial intellectual autonomy. 6 The cannibal artists reject an in-
termediary identity that would cross Europe with Brazil, and instead rebel
against Europe, while at the same time, paradoxically, drawing on their European
experiences and education to define Brazil as pure difference. In the cannibal,
the Brazilian group finds an aggressive symbol capable of subverting the primi-
tivism then in vogue in Europe, in arder to rewrite colonial history and invert
the relationship between center and periphery. They exploit primitivism concep-
tualiy by constructing a wild cultural and philosophical theory, in which primitiv-
ism reconstructs national identity. Antropofagia replaces the predominant colo-
nial models with primai, indigenous, Amazonian scenarios.
The central document of the cannibalist movement is Andrade's "Manifesto
Antropófago" (Cannibal Manifesto), 7 which begins by declaring that the birth of
logic was never permitted among the cannibals. The manifesto foliows a disori-
enting method of inversion, incorporation, and metamorphosis, by which any en-
tity can become its other by subjection to the cannibalistic metaphor of inges-
tion, symbiosis, and change: "Cannibalism .... The world's single law. Disguised
expression of ali individualisms, of ali collectivisms. Of ali religions. Of ali peace
treaties." The dynamic is one of transformation, in which the concepts of race
and ethnicity are ultimately brought to bear on questions of identity, legitimacy,
and authenticity. By allying themselves with cannibalism in a gesture of playful
exuberance, Brazilian avant-garde artists reinvent primitive society from a New
World perspective. They explore cannibalism as a metaphor, broadened to
include other ritual practices, in a theory of national autonomy and development
opposed to Europe. First, they reverse colonial Brazilian historiography: "Down
with ali the importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life.
And the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study."8 They question the
 M O D E R N I S M I modernity
92 ethics of discovery: "Down with the antagonistic sublimations. Brought here in
caravels. Down with the truth of missionary peoples." Second, substituting
periphery for center, they propose indigenous society as a mythicallocus for re-
newing Western social philosophy, ethnography, and art: "We already had Surre-
alist language. The Golden Age. Magic and Life." The cannibal occupies a re-
mate site to which the West is perennially and unconsciously returning in search
of social and economic utopias. Thus, antropofagia's rediscovery of the primitive
New World is also placed in counterpoint with colonial textsof discovery. Work-
ing with an avant-garde vocabulary, they devised a clever point-counterpoint
that was influenced by the logic of anti-art manifestos.
Two artworks, separated by four centuries, introduce and orient the interpre-
tation of antropofagia in the 1920s, with respect to both its effort to recast na-
tional cultural history and its attempt to establish a complex, reflexive relation-
ship with Eu rape and the European avant-garde. The first work consists of fifty-
six woodcuts printed in the originall557 edition of the travels of Hans Staden, a
German adventurer who was captured during his first trip to Brazil by the canni-
balistic Tupinambá tribe. The woodcuts illustrate Staden's experiences during
his eight years with the tribe, which he called wild, naked, fierce, and cannibalis-
tic. Severa! woodcuts depict an orgiastic banquet in the central ground of the vil-
lage, where tribal maidens are greedily devouring roasted body parts (fig. 1). 9
The primitive style of the woodcuts enhances the impression of barbarity given
by the cannibal scenes. While some victims are being dismembered and de-
voured, others are shown awaiting their fate, creating an account that could be
called "black" anthropology. In Brazil, these scenes were reprinted and popular-
ized in a deeply ironic vein in the first "dentition" of the Revista de Antro-
pofagia, used to illustrate the first printing of Andrade's manifesto.
The second work is a painting by Tarsila do Amaral, dated 11 January 1928 and
titled Abaporu; see cover illustration) .10 lt depicts in brilliant colors a featureless
savage with crossed legs, a large foot, anda small head sitting in a stylized tropi-
cal landscape of cacti and sun. With their static forms and dynamic undercur-
rents of calor, Amaral's paintings suggest a neoclassical modernity of simple yet
excessive elements that is visibly linked to her apprenticeship with Fernand
Léger. The indigenous figures are depicted as pure form and volume without
movement, as massive sculptures of bodies that are all calor and shape, and pos-
sessa neoclassical balance. Excess is conveyed aesthetically through giant forms
that defy the canvas's capacity to contain them, and is expressed culturally in the
symbol of a prolific nature, a lemon slice of sun. Prepared for her husband
Oswald de Andrade's birthday, Amaral's canvas becomes the most significant
piece in her antropofagia phase and, predating the manifesto, founds the icon-
ography of Brazil's avant-garde primitivism, anticipating the ideological tenets of
Andrade's literary manifesto. 11
The relationship of these two works epitomizes the creative tensions govern-
ing antropofagia. Staden's cannibalistic story, embedded in Brazil's colonial
background, foregrounds the modernists' paradoxical relationship with Euro-
 JA c K s o N 1 three glad races

93

I lllustration from
Hans Staden, Varhaftige
befchzeibung evner
Landichafft der wilden
nacketen grimmingen
menschfresser /euthen in
der newen welt America
gelegen ... ( 1557). Pho-
tographic source:
Augusto de Campos,
Revista de Antropofagia
(São Paulo: Editora
Abril/ Metal Leve,
1974).

pean culture, from distaste to fascination, and shapes their reception óf Euro-
pean primitivist currents. 12 Through primitivism, the Brazilian modernists re-
solve an intellectual dilemma that concerned Latin America in general: the de-
sire to maintain dose connections to European intellectual culture, and to pre-
serve the racial and cultural heterogeneity that characterized their own societ-
ies. Antropofagia carves out a space between these desires, claiming descent
from two primai fathers, Staden and Abaporu: the new primitivists would take
pleasure in reading Staden's diary while eating him. Andrade would !ater write,
"Since Bilac, we are internationalists and junior Portuguese." 13 The manifesto's
outrageous claims against Europe acquire an uncanny verisimilitude because of
Brazil's dual nature as a primitive and independent New World andas a colonial
vice-world of Portugal. In the ritual banquet of incorporation, the abaporo ab-
sorbs the sacred enemy to assimilate his virtues. 14 For the modernists, the sym-
bolic meal is gratifying yet ultimately ambiguous, since it represents both over-
coming and becoming Europe.
If cannibals belonged to Brazil, the cannibal text had originated in Europe;J.s
since Montaigne and Staden, cannibal tales have been a prime source for the
 M O D E R N I S M I modernity

94 Western imagination, documenting indigenous barbarism with judgments and

perspectives ingrained in most of Brazil's elite. The desire of antropofagia to af-
firm cultural autonomy, political decolonization, and emancipation from Euro-
pean literary traditions leads the learned cannibals to invert the primitive ban-
quet text. Andrade quickly perceived in the near devouring of the German trav-
eler a liberating metaphor that would, if inverted to the Tupinambá per-
spective, exorcise the national appetite for ali things European. The goal of his
inversion, in its shock effect, is to replace the oppressive patriarchal system
identified with Europe, which Andrade saw both as legacy and disease, with the
utopian matriarchy of the tribe: "The paterfamilias and the creation of the
Morality of the Stork. ... In the matriarchy of Pindorama [a Tupy word referring
to the land now known as Brazil]." Through this substitution, the cannibal not
only appropriates the technology of the discoveries through ingestion, but at the
same time remains a mythical source for these positive qualities of civilization
that Europe had lost: "Joy is the proof by nines." European primitivism is there-
fore marshalled against itself, its meaning inverted in favor of Brazil. Antro-
pofagia repatriates the cannibal library, while posing as a pseudocatechism of
salvation. In view of Brazil's lack of pre-sixteenth-century history, antropofagia
further provides a subtext for the missing mythical, epic fable of national ori-
gins. Abaporo is Ulysses posing as ethnographical hero. The savage hero, an ex-
plorer invented in Europe, returns as the native son of a more original civiliza-
tion, organized from the heartlamÍ and governed by the powerful icons of
nature's luxuriance.
Though European paradigms and intellectual traditions are explicitly used as
reference points in the formulation of Brazilian modernist theories, much of
their work also derives from unsung antecedents in their national historiography.
These include works on ethnography, Tupy-Portuguese grammars, early religious
drama, sermons, trave! accounts, writing about the Amazon, and epic poems on
Indianist themes. 16 One can also perceive in antropofagia a recasting of stereo-
types of romantic lndianism and Amazonian exoticism, both remote enough
from contemporary awareness to be mythical. Is the abaporo not a distant
relative of the noble savage Peri, hero of Alencar's novel O Guarani and Carlos
Gomes's opera? 17 Does the utopian matriarchy of Pindorama in the "Cannibal
Manifesto" not suggest the myth of the Amazons, rumored in texts of discovery
to be a jungle tribe of fem ale warriors who sacrificed their mal e offspring? Inter-
est in the Amazon is shared in works by other Brazilian artists in Paris. 18 In this
sense, primitivism is a national movement that could be equated with traditional
symbols of an autochthonous Brazilian culture, located in the timeless, vast
interior, and emanating from the racial and geographic diversity of the popula-
tion. Primitivism, seen as a higher form of regionalism, is thus placed at the ser-
vice of ethnology, while the assertion of the superiority of miscegenation and
cultural diversity replaces an earlier prejudice concerning the racial inferiority
and degeneracy of Brazilians on a national leve!.
 JA c K s o N 1 three glad races

Motifs representing vastness and fecundity, long a part of national histor- 95

iography, are reformulated as part of an ambitious aesthetics of excess. "In a ra-

diant land live three sad races," repeats the São Paulo intellectual and planter
Paulo Prado in his 1928 "Portrait of Brazil," as if it were a truism. Prado's phrase
first invokes references to radiance, grandiosity, and sensuality commonly used
by Portuguese chroniclers to describe the qualities of the newly discovered land,
which the modernists themselves still considered pure, inexhaustible, and
ahistorical. 19 In contrast to the races saddened by history and genetics, nature's
radiance contributes to the Brazilian modernists' aesthetic of excess. The impli-
cations of this concept are crucial to our understanding of the role of the non-
European intellectual in constructing a peripheral primitivism. First, excess is
an aesthetic that is derived from the European avant-garde movements them-
selves, in their rejection of the past and the status quo. Through primitivism,
antropofagia transforms this relationship to the past into an enhanced, imagina-
tive, and paradoxical treatment of national primitivism, whose aggressive com-
ponents are turned against their European sources: Furthermore, in a move that
is decisive for the aftermath of the movement, the Brazilian cannibals seek to as-
sociate avant-garde primitivism with national identity through the metaphor of
devouring. Finally, this move also strengthens the idea that Brazilian or Latin
American art is fundamentally characterized by excess, whether it be found in
colonial chronicles, in the whimsical local baroque style of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, in modernist manifestos, or in the graphics of concrete
poetry. Excess is linked with themes o f utopia and libertinism, both of which ap-
ply to readings of Andrade's literary cannibalism.
Antropofagia locates excess in a telluric primitivism, and illustrates it in the
extravagance of its ringing claims: "Down with the vegetable elites. In communi-
cation with the soil. ... Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had dis-
covered happiness." To promote a different historical awareness, the manifesto
also ridicules the prophetic texts ofWestern discovery: "Routes. Routes. Routes.
Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. The Carib instinct." The "Cannibal Manifesto,"
with its extravagant claims, becomes the Brazilian avant-garde's epiphanic reca-
pitulation of epic texts such as the colonial chronicles that recount miraculous
and unexpected discoveries. The cannibalists' criticai writings displace the
chronicles and reclaim the land in the name of indigenous cultures. Language it-
self is also carried to excess, whether in the invocation of untranslated Tupy
verse garnished from Couto de Magalhães ("Catiti Catiti I Imara Notiá I Notiá
Imara I lpejú") 20 or in the reduction of Shakespeare to comic paranomasia:
'Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question." The destruction of the colonial text
through parody and rewriting wipes out colonial historiography and amounts to
an atavistic declaration of independence, whether in the name of indigenism or
of avant-garde techniques. By appropriating the metaphor of discovery, the
cannibal modernists create a new tropical vocabulary anda mythology of nature's
riches that are shaped by the indigenous cultural perspectives they have
invented.
 M O D E R N I S M I modern ity
96 Prado's lyrical description of the sadness of Brazil's native Americans, Afri-
cans, and Europeans recapitulates the synesthesia of a verse by poet Olavo Bilac
(Brazil's music was the "amorous flower of three sad races"); both reflect differ-
ent degrees of assimilation of the racial theories and concerns prevalent in Brazil
since romanticism. Various theories exist to explain racial sadness: perhaps it
stemmed from existential anguish resulting from a history of conquest and
slavery; or it was the result of "scientific" racialist theories of inferiority and
degeneracy that had been applied to the majority of Brazil's multi-racial popula-
tion.21 The racial ideais and attitudes of the modernists, in spite of their explicit
alliance with indigenism, were of necessity imbued with the positivism, material-
ism, and evolutionism that were widespread in Brazil after 1876. Centered in the
Recife school of Tobias Barreto, materialist theories fed a reaction against
Catholic humanism and in favor of applied science, through readings of Comte,
Darwin, Taine, Renan, and Haeckel. 22 Skidmore notes that positivism was attrac-
tive to a largely white elite interested in economic development without social
change, and was bolstered by the general belief that the historically multiracial
society of Brazil was free of racial prejudice (BW, 13, 22). Miscegenation and
evolutionary processes, it was thought, were acting in f~vor of "civilization"
through a successive "whitening" of the general population over time, a result of
the long-term effects of European immigration; racial fusion, whose end result
would be a unified Brazilian population, could be promoted because of confi-
dence in eventual white predominance. As Andrade dryly observed in his poem,
"Capital of the Republic":

The pride ofbeing white

In the swarthy conquered land ...
The artificial Sugar Loaf. 23

Liberal ideas of the late nineteenth century, however, were propounded in a

society not essentially different from what it had been in the early days of the
century (BW, 27). A contradictory state of affairs was created whereby liberal
reformers first advanced theories of social Darwinism, and many intellectuals
were affected by categories of scientific racism. 24 Brazilian intellectual circles
were in fact dominated by concerns with backwardness, inferiority, and
degeneracy that had been put forth in racialist theories of Brazil, found in the
works of such European and North American figures as Henry Thomas Buckle,
Arthur Comte de Gobineau, and Agassiz or the Argentine José Ingenieros. Critic
and essayist Sílvio Romero, while unsure what miscegenation would ultimately
contribute to the nation's future, gave a pessimistic assessment of the three ma-
jor racial groups: "the senility of the Negro, the laziness of the Indian, the
authoritarianism and miserly talent of the Portuguese had produced a shapeless
nation with no original or creative qualities" (BW, 36). 25
Partially echoing Romero forty years later, Mário de Andrade's multiracial
character Macunaíma, 26 emperor of the jungle Amazons, is vaunted as a new na-
 JA c K s o N 1 three glad races

tional symbol in the novel's subtitle, "a hero without any character," even though 97

his talent for racial metamorphosis and his sexual prowess are presented as
magical, positive qualities. Through Macunaíma, modemist primitivism asserts
that indigenous societies lack a history or a blueprint for the future, and occupy
a space that is vacant of organized culture, save what repeats or replies to the
WestY The primitive is conceived through difference and inversion, qualities
vocalized in Macunaíma's endearing cry of pleasure, "Ai! Que preguiça!" 28
Macunaíma serves Mário de Andrade's desire to satirize modem culture by
subjecting it to the Amazon hero's criticai eye. In the chapter "Letter to the
Icamiabas," for example, Macunaíma writes from São Paulo to his subjects, the
Icamiabas, using the latinate language of Lisbon and signing himself "Imper-
ator." Playing on the themes of culture and barbarity, Macunaíma reveals to his
female subjects that they are spuriously called "Amazons" by the uncultured in-
habitants of the city. Parodying discovery texts, the letter cast Macunaíma in the
role of classicist, defending the humanism of the Amazons against the nascent
materialism of São Paulo's industrial modemization. Thus, while modemists
such as Mário de Andrade brought folklore into being as a discipline in Brazil,
indigenous traditions and cultures were at the same time inevitably read with
modemist eyes and shaped by the literary desire to transpose and filter the
primitive hero into Western terms. 29
Mário de Andrade begins his novel by describing Macunaíma as "the hero of
our people, bom in the depths of the virgin jungle as black as the son of the fear
of night." Racial difference in Macunaíma is profoundly connected both to
nature and to mythology; it is not a fixed quality, but rather is subject to sudden
transmutation. In the chapter "Piamã," Mário de Andrade constructs a modem
myth of race and society. When black Macunaíma and his brothers Jiguê and
Manaape leave the jungle village of Tapanhumas on their way to São Paulo to
recover the goddess Ci's magic amulet, they encounter a river in which
Macunaíma spots a massive rock in midstream, creating a pond shaped like a
gigantic foot. Shouting because the water is so cold, Macunaíma reaches the
grotto and takes a bath, not knowing the water is enchanted because the footprint
was made by a saintly missionary who had been evangelizing the Indians. The
water's effect leaves Macunaíma white, blond, and blue-eyed. When Jiguê wit-
nesses this magical transformation, he too rushes to enter the water. But so
much blackness has been washed off Macunaíma that the dirty water leaves him
only bronzed. When Manaape goes to bathe, there is so little water remaining
that he is able only to wet the soles of his hands and feet, which become red-
dened beca use of the holy water. While as a result of this episode Macunaíma is
the best prepared to enter "civilization," Manaape is said to be the true son of
the Tapanhumas: a combination of black and red. Racial "whitening" as an ideal
is parodied as the occult desire of Catholic evangelicals to change indigenous
peoples into themselves. The saint's gigantic foot, ironically, finds an unexpected
ally in the cannibalistic metaphor of Amaral's Abaporu, whose enormous foot
symbolizes being in nature. Mário de Andrade's command of the primitive,
 M O D E R N I S M I modernity

98 magical powers of metamorphosis brings mythology and linguistic virtuosity in to

contact with the magical transformations of the folktale. Notwithstanding the
flaws o f their times, these m~odernist writers and artists succeed in counteracting
the pervasive influences of the sad theories of the past by placing the primitive
at the top of the human scale and by inverting racialist theories, affirming sup-
posed defects as superior features. Through modernism's literary and largely fic-
tional ethnographies, the Indian, the black, the mestiço, 30 and the European im-
migrant become the glad races, sources of national strength and definition.

Modernism's Glad Races

Oswald de Andrade's "Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto" (1924) and the volume of

Brazilwood Poetry (1925), 31 illustrated by the colorist, geometrical "brazil-
wood" -style paintings of Tarsila do Amaral, are cru9ial predecessors to the "Can-
nibal Manifesto," for they attempt to redefine Brazil by assimilating mechanical
modernization to telluric ethnicity. When Andrade proclaims, in his first mani-
festo, the symbiosis of "the forest and the school" in a new Brazilian society, he
places shamans alongside military airfields and electric turbines in the National
Museum. In a modernist world, Brazil's savage territory is the most modem of
ali, drawihg deepest both from nature and mechanization and ultimately demon-
strating their interdependence. European traditions are more deeply felt in
Brazil because their coexistence with indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures
brings them closer to the dark heart of their own primitive origins and occult
meanings, where their symbolism is made more glaringly apparent as ritual and
artífice. The 1924 manifesto, for example, reacts against the false erudition of
the Empire: "Misfortune of the first white brought over, politically dominating
the wild wilderness. The alumnus. We can't help being erudite. Doctors of phi-
losophy. Country of anonymous ills, of anonymous doctors." Pero Vaz Caminha's
letter of discovery of 1500, quoted in Andrade's poetry, relates how European
food and eating habits were imposed on the astonished Indians, who had no in-
terest in Portuguese fowl; the raising of a giant cross on shore with the participa-
tion of the Indians convinces the conquerors that religious conversion was ali
but complete. In this world of assimilation, European customs are taken out of
their milieu and melded with indigenous and African practices. The Afro-Brazil-
ian religion, candomblé, unites African, indigenous, and Catholic religious prac-
tices and beliefs. Macunaíma performs a macumba ritual in order to punish the
villain who possessed his magic amulet; and Mário de Andrade quotes widely in
his novel from the cordelliterature of Brazil's Northeast, a literature that was
printed in popular chapbooks, and combined features of the medieval Iberian
folktale, the chivalric epic, and performed lyric verse. Such fusions yield a
nationalized tropical folklore, later claimed and authenticated by the purists of
local tradition mentioned by Osman Lins.
 JA c K s o N 1 three glad races
99
The "Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto" advances an iconography of cultural
transformation whose modemizing ambitions are confirmed in Amaral's paint-
ings, and whose purpose is, in Andrade's terms, a general reconstruction of soci-
ety. Their shared vision flashes exuberantly with the bright colors observed in
popular society: "shacks of saffron and ochre in the green of the Favela, under
Cabralin blue." Tropical nature and a hybrid culture, colored by race and
ethnicity, generate images of ostentation and excess that incongruously unite op-
posites and appear out of context: "Rui Barbosa: a top hat in Senegambia ....
Negresses at the jockey club. Odalisques in Catumbi." Brazilwood poetry, agile
and candid like a wandering kodak-to borrow its own striking simile-was to be
the country's first exportable structure in a new poetic mercantilism. Promoting
a national style through a program of simplicity, irony, ingenuousness, and natu-
ralness, this new perspective humorously describes and justifies what amounts to
an excessive penetration of modemity into land and society at alllevels. Brazil's
past, epitomized by a lawyer citing Virgil to the Tupiniquins, becomes but a
painful and anonymous memory; the present, under the slogan "barbarous and
ours," is constructed from a synchronic cultural perspective using the techniques
of modemist art: synthesis, invention, and surprise. Both as a way of life and as a
modem style, Brazilwood's carefully constructed naturalness cultivates a self-
conscious tropicality: "Pau Brasil poetry is a Sunday dining room with birds sing-
ing in the condensed forest of cages, a thin fellow composing a waltz for flute
and Mary Lou reading the newspaper. The present is ali there in the newspaper."
Those cultural images that had been selected to constitute the modemist style
are transformed into enduring scenic and sensual icons of tropicalized Brazil:
carnaval, sertão, and favela. Andrade locates the luxuriance of Brazil's moder-
nity partly in its open ethnicity, from the vatapá of Afro-Brazilian cuisine to the
dance, and partly in "brazilwood" nature: the silent, tranquil energy of botanical
and mineral wealth under an enervating sun. Ethnicity resembles nature in its
sensual, energetic, and indolent wisdom; the portraits of the glad races are re-
drawn using the pure lines and colors of modem art. 32
One of Amaral's finest works is Carnival in Madureira (fig. 2), another canvas
in the style of geometrical cubism that she leamed in Paris from Léger and used
to depict cultural landscapes that document Brazil's modem identity as it was
being theorized in Brazilwood Poetry. Amaral employed this style in some forty
paintings from 1923-27, known as her Pau Brasil phase. The painting succeeds
in creating a particularly rich fusion of European structural elements (geometric
cubism) and American realities (folklore, popular culture, rustic folk from the
interior), with the resulting incongruities that give the work its characteristic
Pau Brasil identity. The scene of a popular Brazilian rural celebration of
carnaval by the town's black inhabitants, a world summarized by the shapes and
colors of a village of the interior, is invaded by a strange and overpowering cen-
tral structure that we recognize as the Eiffel Tower with its geometric cubism. It
overshadows the only other figure rising above the village houses and hilltops, a
palm tree representing tropical nationalism. The tower was perhaps built by the
 M O D E R N I S M I modernity

100

2 Tarsila do Amaral,
Carnival in Madureira
( 1924), 76cm x 63cm.
Photographic source:
Sérgio Milliet, Tarsila
(São Paulo: Lázara
Gráfica, 1966).

celebrants as a carnivalesque fantasy originating in the village. But as an allegory

of the carnivalesque imagination, its strangeness suggests a transposition of the
technological, civilized city of its origin to the animated space of the primitive
village of mulatto or black Brazilians. In the same fashion, the villagers carry
their Afro-Brazilian and primitivist roots to the European carnival, itself trans-
posed to a propitious environment of tropical excess. In an inversion justified by
the "Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto," the native women dominate the Eiffel
Tower by appropriating its geometry, in the shape of an inverted V, for their own
bodies. In the foreground, an extremely tall, thin woman assumes the same posi-
tion as the tower, which now becomes a popular projection of tropical playful-
ness and folkloric nationalism. There are still other leveis of significance and
irony, in the choice of the Eiffel Tower. Paris had been the center of Brazilian
cultural aspiration since colonial times and, further, was the source of inspiration
of Amaral's painting. The painting's excess stems from the incongruity of its jux-
tapositions, whatever historical and cultural antecedents may justify them; for
the viewer, this creates an effect of ethnographic surrealism, as a modernist icon
is transformed into a fetish that infiltrates and dominates both imagination and
society.
Language is also subjected to brazilwood simplification and synthesis.
Andrade's goal is to Brazilianize the Portuguese language, rejecting archaisms
 JA c Kso N 1 three glad races

and erudition while proclaiming the naturalness of neological forms, which IOI

should come into everyday usage from contact with languages such as Tupy-
Guarani and Yoruba. Taking a position against normative linguistic rules and
Jesuit grammars, Andrade praises "the millionaire contribution of all mistakes."
He thinks popular speech will contain the mythical truths of indigenous lore,
which should be capable of totemizing mystery and death when uttered by the
glad races as pure sound. In the poem "Brasil," the nation is defined by ethnic
speech that conveys meaning exclusively through chant, rhythm, and incantation:
"Tetteray tettay Keezá Keezá Kaysay!" (the Guarani); "Uuh! Uah! Uuh!" (the
jaguar); "Canyem Babá Canyem Babá Cum Cum!" (the Negro). In the manifesto,
the excessive, sensual, and alogical qualities of pure language express the two
symbolic extremes ofhuman activity: carnival and prayer.
The crucial role of Afro-Brazilians in modem society is another central theme
of Andrade's manifesto and his poetry: "You have the train loaded, ready to leave.
A Negro chums the crank of the turn-table beneath you. The slightest careless-
ness and you willleave in the opposite direction to your destination." The black
engineer supplies not only the physical labor for this allegorical train ride into
the interior but also guides the controls that will keep it on track and determine
its destination. 33 In the poem "sabará," the name of a colonial city in the moun-
tains of Minas Gerais, Andrade contrasts the sun and the metallic gold of the
streams to the black wave of human slaves whose mythical strength was continu-
ously sifting the riverbed: "There used to be black men lined along the shore, to
siphon the metallic river." "Combat" brings to life a match between'black and
white prizefighters: "Benedito attacks and lands I right-hand punches I He's
pushed the white man against the ropes."34 In "On the Plantation," "a roça,"
Andrade ties the strength of the slaves to the linguistic rhythm and musicality of
their food (Jost in the English translation): "os cem negros da fazenda I comiam
feijão e angu I Abóbora chicória e cambuquira I Pegavam uma roda de carro I Nos
braços" (The plantation's hundred negroes I Ate beans and mush I Chickory
squash and squash greens I They could pick up a wagon wheel I In their arms).
Andrade's retrospective constructs a panoramic vision of Negro civilization dur-
ing slavery, with ali its attendant mixture of horror and humanity, seen in "Inci-
dent,"

The mulatto girl died

And appeared
Shrieking in the mil!
Pounding the pestle

as well as in "Old Black Man,"

Fui! of splotches
On his face on his crutches
Begging the same alms twice
Because ali he sees is a cloud of mosquitoes.'l-5
 M O D E R N I S M I modernity
102 Antropofagia also includes claims about race and gender in its reordering of
national priorities. In the poem "Portuguese Error," Andrade sets up nudity as
the opposite of colonization, referring to the manifesto's association of dress
with oppression: "Down with the dressed and oppressive social reality."

The Portuguese arrived

During a heavy rain

And dressed up the Indian

What a pity!
Had it been a sunny morning
The Indian would have undressed
The Portuguese. 36

The nudity of the tribe represents both a return to the golden age and an
inversion of Freudian repression. As one of the natural "goods" of Pau Brasil
nature, nudity has a dialectical role, simultaneously symbolizing an unclothed,
alogical mentality and intimating a subversive, prohibited sexuality.
A mulatto woman in a carnival procession links race to eroticism, as the ritual's
primitive forces spill over the boundaries of propriety and reveal a sexuality that
further challenges European norms. In Brazilian historiography, as in modern-
ism, eroticism is often expressed through the paradisíaca} theme of libertinage;
here, the dancer's rhythmic vitality originates in a languid sensuality that con-
nects the depths of colonization with the modem present:

"Rio by Night"
A mulatto woman struts down the avenues
Like a star on stage
There are a million sambas
In the resident laziness ...
From the heart of the colonyY

In "The 'Girls at the Wharf' Andrade similarly returns to the founding letter of
discovery by Caminha to cut out ready-made passages in which the Portuguese
scribe projects the shame engendered by his own culture onto the open, tropical
sexuality of naked indigenous maidens:

There were three o r four in number very young and very fair
With very black hair draping their shoulders
And their shame so straight and tall
That when we stared at them
We felt no shame at all. 1s

Through his ready-made history of Brazil, Andrade equates the luxuriant eroti-
cism of nature with cultural and racial heterogeneity; the erotic encounter of na-
ture with race thus drives the paradisiacal vision of the glad races.
 JA c K s o N t three glad races
103

3 Tarsila do Amaral,
Antropofagia ( 1929),
126cm xl42cm. Private
collection, Rio de
Janeiro. Photographic
source: Mário Carelli,
Art. d'Amérique Latine,
1911-1968 (Paris:
Éditions du Centre
Georges Pompidou,
1992).

Manifesto Art Excesses

The first declaration of the "Cannibal Manifesto" in which cannibalism is extolled

as a universal metaphor for societies at large is its most excessive and subversive:
"Cannibalism alone unites us .... The world's single law." The "Cannibal Mani-
festo" sets forth an ideological framework for the Brazilian avant-garde, borrow-
ing from the language of European manifestos in order to proclaim a new Brazil-
ian cultural cannibalism. 39 Jumping across boundaries-whether the law, the
text, o r society-is a practice directly advocated by the metaphor of cannibalism,
in that it evokes a contagious, ritual, and obsessive devouring of limits. Since the
cannibal had been relegated to the status of alien by Western society because of
bis forbidden yet hypnotizing taste for human f1esh, Andrade strikes a sensitive
chord in probing the forbidden, consuming desires sanctioned by cannibal "law,"
which becomes a central point in the modernist critique of society, psychology,
and art. The Brazilian is incorruptibly indigenous, Andrade hints, and has always
harbored primitive impulses under a playful veneer of European politics and
vestments: "The Indian dressed as senator of the Empire." The perverse inter-
mingling of racial boundaries implicit in Staden's woodcuts-indigenous eaters
and European victims-becomes a matter of justice in the "Cannibal Mani-
festo." Cannibal justice is even more eagerly applied to questions of gender
through the supremacy of matriarchy. An unsublimated sexual instinct is the re-
venge of the matriarchs; it is also the sublime limit of the cannibalistic metaphor
that symbolizes a Brazilian utopia that is carnal both in the undressed f1esh of
the tribe and in the dressings of the banquet. The cannibalistic metaphor thus
becomes an aesthetic that reaches across the boundaries of race, gender, and
ethnicity by representing the nature and laws of the glad races through their
difference from colonial realities. 40
 M O D E R N I S M I modernity
104 In Amaral's 1929 painting, Antropofagia (fig. 3) primitivism is an aesthetic, a
theory, and the source of a modernist national mythology. This canvas in effect
synthesizes the forces of her earlier treatments of ethnicity and cannibalism, A
Negra (1923) andAbaporu (1928). Amaral works with forms that are icons in the
semiotics of tropical indigenism as rediscovered in its modernist luxuriance. Her
1923 portrait of a black woman is already a complete realization of the
antropofagia style: a gigantic 'sitting figure occupies a landscape of geometrical
forms and colors, dominating the foreground with her outlined presence. She is
all shape, with a few large features symbolizing race and social function. A
prominent breast with nipple is draped over her arm; thick, protruding lips and a
broad nose intimate African ancestry. The woman is almost pure form, sitting in
her habitat in an eternal pose. The painting Antropofagia repeats the gigantic
images that threaten to overflow the margins with their volume and presence.
Once again, the black woman is a plain figure whose only attributes are a small
head, an enormous foot, and one suspended breast, but now she is accompanied
by the abaporu, whose giant foot crosses her own. The sun, now overwhelmed by
monolithic forms of green tropical foliage, is a more clearly drawn lemon slice
than in the previous painting.
Everywhere the painting gestures toward excess-the energy in the gargan-
tuan forms; the power of natural forces conveyed in the serendipitous hyperbole
of form and concept; and the tiny heads and enormous feet that represent a
rejection of ideas and a oneness with an exuberant nature. Out of the jungle's
"spectacular tranquillity"-to quote Pau Brasil-comes an irrepressible vitality.
Eternal and depersonalized, the human figures are icons o f primordial space and
embodiments of the newly discovered "primitive mentality." Cannibalism vital-
izes the serene iconography into a visual and "theological" feast, an appetite for
an ethnographical ambrosia of flesh, sun, nudity, and foliage. Color, like language
in poetry, connects force with simplicity, and in this painting, it is revitalized
through the radiance and excess of a constructed tropical purity. Containing
parody, stylization, and habitat, the painting is self-reflective about its construct-
ivist and postcubist borrowings. Tropicalization of form, space, and color adds to
the myth of excess and tÓ the ideology of luxuriant emptiness that characterizes
primitive space and culture in the modernist imagination. Like the subsumed
cannibal banquet, the painting is a celebratory ritual of voracious and predatory
expansiveness; the scene orates an epic fable of erotic, exotic, and unconscious
geographies. Being and acting instinctually, the black and the Indian look out of
the painting at the Western observer, not with the longing of saudade (a medi-
eval Portuguese word, considered untranslatable, conveying a kind of intense
longing and melancholy), but with what the observer imagines to be unalienated
joy, ritual fulfillment, and unrepressed appetite. Amaral's iconography enhances
antropofagia's portrait of the primitive as a young, glad, racially mixed Brazilian.
 JA c K s o N 1 three glad races
lOS
Eating the Heart

Two Europeans, Bishop Sardinha and Hans Staden, serve to set the emblematic
parameters of the cannibal banquet seen as a rebellion by homo ludens.
Antropofagia, like the French Revolution, establishes a new calendar dating
from the devouring of Bishop Sardinha (Sardine) by the Caetés in 1556; Staden's
woodcuts and narrative give the revolutionary dinner ethnographic credibility.
In view of its debt to Staden, the "Cannibal Manifesto" can be read as the trans-
atlantic bridge between a New World "savage utopia," rooted in the body and
developing as an erotic perversion of origins, and a traditional pagan neoclassi-
cism, represented in the earthly paradise. lt is a dialogic banquet of culture and
food, eating and reading, raw and cooked, speech and text, in which one discur-
si:ve domain passes into another.
In the "Cannibal Manifesto" primitivism and ethnicity are joined to reveal an
alternate, savage eldorado: 41 "The Golden Age heralded by America. The Golden
Age. And ali the girls." The manifesto's inventive key phrases can be considered
parallel to the giant feet in Amaral's paintings:

Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question.

Joy is the proofby nines.
We can only answer to the oracular world.

In these synthetic, capsule inscriptions, Andrade cannibalizes European cultural

and theoretical statements and opposes the rationality that sustains them;
antropofagia digests its European referents. The voices of the glad races call out
from the depths of Brazil's interior, at once echoing and correcting Europe with
the newly found authority of primitive and mythical origins: "I am only con-
cerned with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal." Excess and
allusion are the subversive tools used to invert European practice and replace it
with a revolutionary primitivism based on nature and instinct: "We want the
Carib Revolution. Greater than the French Revolution. The unification of ali
productive revolts for the progress of humanity. Without us, Europe wouldn't
even have its meager declaration of the rights of man." Andrade's goal is
modernist autonomy not only in literature but in society as well.
Since the language and logic of historicism have failed, they are to be substi-
tuted by the alogic of ethnographic surrealism. Guaraci and Jaci are the goddess-
matriarchs of the new arder in which rationality is supplanted by instinct:

We already had justice, the codi.fication o f vengeance. Science, the codification of

Magic. Cannibalism. The permanent transformation of the Tabu in to a totem ....
We already had Communism. We already had Surrealist language .... We never had
speculation. But we had divination. We had Politics, which is the science of distri-
bution. And a social system in harmony with the planet. The Golden Age.
 M O D E R N I S M I modernity
106
In an imagined "Carib Revolution," the glad, strong races, secure in a sane
land isolated from Old World diseases identified by Freud, mock Europe while
appropriating the occult objects of its desires. Freudian psychology, in fact, is
Andrade's main source for describing the defects of the European mind: "Down
with the dressed and oppressive social reality registered by Freud." His task is a
complex and utopian rediscovery of origins and rewriting of history: "reality
without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without peniten-
tiaries, in the matriarchy of Pindorama." Whether read socially, economically,
philosophically, or ethnographically, the cannibalistic metaphor cuts across all
boundaries. lt answers Europe's dialectical obsession with heavens and hells by
combining in the Tupy feast of cannibal rhetoric the leisure and eroticism of
naturalluxuriance, the joy incarnated in an icon or a totem, and the technology
of social and psychological machinery. Primitive gladness replaces Western
themes of utopia and salvation.
Antropofagia's program stages an attempt to use modernity for the purpose of
subverting European primacy and paradigms. For the Brazilian cannibals, the
primitivist ideais a useful catalyst for changing the relationship between national
literature and art and their European background. As a program for local
authenticity, however, the cannibal enterprise contains inherent contradictions
and paradoxes-limited contact with Brazil's racial and geographical diversity,
the manifesto's dependence on literary sources, and the use of cosmopolitan
models to construct a national modernity out of Brazil's primitiye world of the
interior. Although one of their major contributions is to legitimize the positive
values of race and ethnicity as lasting components of national identity, the
modernist program as a prototype for contemporary art can be criticized for an
excessive confidence in its ability to speak for native peoples; the massive
destruction of ecology and extinction of tribes in Amazonia since 1960 shows that
the modernists never questioned the ability of the tribal primitive-the new
heart of national identity-to survive the forces of modernity and modernization
that they endorsed. They are neither sufficiently aware of the implications of
their highly centralist and reductionist concept of national autonomy, nor wary of
the power of cannibalism to consume Brazil's own interior. Albeit ingenious, the
movement's position was thus inauthentic because, to use Clifford's terms, it was
"caught between cultures, implicated in others." 42 Perhaps this is simply to say
that it was inten}ational. lt was, after all, in the rebellious atmosphere of the
continental avant-garde movements that Amaral and Andrade learned to value
primitivism as part of their Latin American domain. The tensions in their intel-
lectual position, denoting constant exchange between self and other, reflect their
own historical moment. The dynamic but unstable dialectical system of antro-
pofagia is likewise descriptive of Brazil's own past, which had depended upon
both telluric and metropolitan traditions.
Referring to North American authors who portray another race, John R.
Cooley condemns the simplification of the primitivist subject, the lack of regard
for the reality of primitive life, and the exploitation of the primitive as a sounding
 JA c K s o N t three glad races
107
board for the writer's own perspectives. 43 In the Brazilian case, although the
writing ascribed to the primitive voice from the outside is similarly feigned and
inauthentic, the illogic and surreality of a cannibal's manifesto falls within the
spirit of Andrade's project and thus constitutes a convincing text. Andrade seems
keenly aware of the irony of his appropriations as an outsider; he justifies them by
changing European prime materiais into a different language, a savage discourse:
"Children of the sun, mother of the living. Discovered and loved ferociously with
all the hypocrisy of saudade, by the immigrants, by slaves and by the touristes. In
the land of the Great Snake." On a rhetoricallevel, the manifesto can be de-
fended both as a parody and as the apotheosis of the genre. It begins by mocking
Marx-"Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically"-
and ends by suggesting the rediscovery of an actual pagan paradise through canni-
balism.
Yet the limitations of avant-garde indigenism are betrayed by a superficial
familiarity and romantic identification with the tribal primitive. Why do the
Tupinambá cannibals eat so much European food? Staden is necessary to
authenticate the description of a national cannibal (re)past that, for antropofagia,
had no historical presence. Given the founding role assigned to his "fieldwork,"
one may ask whether antropofagia's symbolic modernist ritual is really a barba-
rous transgression or just a synthetic, if also subversive, self-renewal. In this
sense, the elite urban cannibals never really escape the ambiguous heritage of
their colonial education, since by adopting the characteristics of Europe's
imaginary other-albeit in an aggressive ingestion-in order to define their new
self, they tacitly accept the identity that the West has foisted upon its primitive
other. 44 Acts of supposed anticolonial incorporation or devouring, in effect, leave
the Brazilians in a position more equivocai than ever before. 45 Situated between
cultures, antropofagia runs the risk of erasing the narrating self by removing the
distinction between self and other, between subject and object. What remains is
only the tedious vagueness and timelessness of an "artificial Sugar Loaf' para-
dise. Ironically, by consuming the pristine interior of Brazil, the modernist can-
nibals are eating their own hearts. From our contemporary perspective, the
enduring contribution to modernity of this movement in favor of indigenous
artistic autonomy resides less in its dynamism and more in its instability-the
tension of its double desire to situate cultural autonomy in Brazil's ethnicity and
to stand at the cutting edge of the cosmopolitan avant-garde.

NOTES
Ali translations, unless otherwise noted, are the author's own.
l. Osman Lins, A Rainha dos Cárceres da Grécia, trans. Adria Frizzi (Normal, Ill.:
Dalkey Archive Press, 1994, in press).
2. Antropofagia can be described within James Clifford's term "ethnographic surrealism"
because of its dialogic relationship with European primitivism, of the type h e calls "modernist
collage" (The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art
[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988], 13). Paulo Medeiros, among others,
 M O D E R N I S M I modernity

I 08 notes the nominal surrealist models for antropofagia: the magazine Cannibale (Paris, 1920)
and the "Manifesto Cannibale Dada" by Francis Picabia. Benedito Nunes agrees that in the
French publications, the term "cannibal" is meant only to shock and lacks the precise políti-
ca!; cultural, and literary program of the Brazilian movement (Benedito Nunes, "Antropofagia
ao alcance de todos" in A Utopia Antropofágica [São Paulo: Secretaria de Estado da Cultural
Editora Globo, 1990]). For studies of the Revista de Antropofagia consult Maria Eugênia
Boaventura, A Vanguarda Antropofágica (São Paulo: Atica, 1985) and Augusto de Campos,
"Revistas Re-vistas: os antropófagosg" in Revista de Antropofagia ed. Oswald de Andrade (São
Paulo: Editora Abril/Metal Leve, 1975).
3. For an analysis of the different modernist schools of thought from a philosophical per-
spective, see Eduardo Jardim de Morais, A Brasilidade Modernista (São Paulo: Graal, 1978).
There are two lines of development that treat similar material in different ways: the Pau
Brasil ar "Brazilwood" group of 1924 is a precursor of Antropofagia (1928-29), while the
Verdamarelo (Green Yellow) faction, taking its name from the colors of the national flag, is
followed by the Anta (Tapir) group. The split between a theoretical, in the first case, anda
literal reading of primitivism, in the second, becomes apparent in an analysis of the manifestos
published by each group.
4. Tarsila do Amaral returned to Paris in 1922 after the São Paulo Modem Art Week,
where she studied with Léger and exhibited her paintings at the Galerie Perder. Amaral in-
troduced Oswald de Andrade to Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, and other avant-garde figures
who frequented her atelier. The interdisciplinary and international dimensions of this Brazil-
ian style come to light through paintings, poetry, and music developed by Brazilian and
French artists who were in contact in Paris in the early 1920s and shared an aesthetic interest
in Brazilian culture. Of a large group including Paul Claudel, Darius Milhaud, Cendrars,
Heitor Villa-Lobos, Anita Malfatti, and Amaral, the Swiss-French poet Cendrars, who was to
trave! to Brazil in 1924, had the greatest influence on the nascent Brazilian style. Amaral and
Andrade led an elegant life among·the artistic and literary elite. Their collaboration included
her illustrations for Andrade's Brazilwood Poetry, published in 1925, and a corresponding
"brazilwood" phase in her own paintings. See Stella de Sá Rego, "Tarsila/Pau Brasil: Her
Sources in the French Avant-Garde and the Significance of Her Work in the Context of Bra-
zilian Modernism," (Master's Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1984); Aracy Amaral,
Blaise Cendrars no Brasil e os Modernistas (São Paulo: Martins, 1970); and Alexandre Eulálio,
A Aventura Brasileira de Blaise Cendrars (São Paulo: Quíron, 1978). Mário Carelli describes
the euphoric and exotic details:

Dans l'atelier de Tarsila, rue Hégésippe Moreau, à Montmartre, se réunissaient non

seulment les Brésiliens mais encore toute l'avant-garde artistique parisienne pour les
déjeuners typiques: "Feijoada, composé de bacuri, pinga, cigarettes de paille de mais
étaient indispensables pour donner la note exotique .... Premie r échelon: Cendrars,
Fernand Léger, Jules Supervielle, Brancusi, Robert Delaunay, Vollard, Rolf de Maré,
Darius Milhaud, le prince noir Kojo Tovalou (Cendrars adore les Negres) .... La
ravissante Tarsila, habillée par Poiret, héritiere d'une dynastie de planteurs, offre un
singe à Léger, assumant sans complexe sa "brésilianité." ("À Paris, les Brésiliens à
l'affut de la modernité," in Art d'Amérique latine, 1911-1968 [Paris: Éditions du
Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992], 94-99.)

5. Natural philosophy is defined as cosmology ora metaphysics of nature, which is an at-

tempt to understand natural phenomena by tracing them back to the conditions of their possi-
bility. Its rules are considered universally valid and discoverable by reason alone. Walter
Brugger, Dictionary of Philosophy (Spokane: Gonzaga University Press, 1972), 269-70.
6. Susan Bassnett discusses the literary interest in antropofagia among recent Brazilian
authors in Comparative Literature: A Criticai lntroduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 153-54.
A brief analysis of the movement as indigenism is found in Doris Sommer, Foundational
Fíctíons: the National Romances of Latín America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), 138-39.
 JA c K s o N 1 three glad races

7. Oswald de Andrade, "Manifesto Antropófago," Revista de Antropofagia 1 (May 1928); 109

"Cannibal Manifesto," trans. Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review 19 (1991): 35-47;
also in French, "Le manifeste anthropophage," trans. Benedito Nunes, in Surréalisme
périphérique, ed. Luis de Moura Sobral (Montréal: Université de Montréal, 1984), 180-92;
and in Spanish, Oswald de Andrade: obra escogida, trans. Héctor Olea (Caracas: Ayacucho,
1984), 65-72. On Oswald de Andrade, see Maria Augusta Fonseca Abramo, Oswald de
Andrade (1890-1954): biografia (São Paulo: Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1990).
8. Andrade makes a sarcastic reference to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, French philosopher and
ethnologist (1857-1939) who had published La mentalité primitive in 1927.
9. Hans Staden, Varhaftige befchzeibung eyner Landichafft der wilden nacketen
grimmingen menschfresser leuthen in der newen welt America gelegen ... (Marburg: Andres
Colben, 1557). The volume included forty-six large woodcuts and ten smaller woodcuts, with
the title page printed in red and black. It is one of the coincidences of the European primitivist
vogue that Staden's work appeared in English translation in London in 1928. There was also a
modernized German edition in 1925.
10. Amaral's painting Abaporu (Tupy, "man who eats") captivated viewers in 1992-93 on
both continents in the traveling exhibit, "Art in Latin America, 1911-1968."
11. The most comprehensive study of Amaral is found in Aracy Amaral's Tarsila, 2 vols.
(São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1975). Many of her works are reproduced in Sérgio Milliet's Tarsila
(São Paulo: Lázara Gráfica, 1966). In English consult Stella de Sá Rego's "Tarsila!Pau Brasil."
12. Staden's text is the anthropophagists' obligatory reference for information on canni-
balism.
13. Andrade's verse is from "O Escaravelho de Ouro" (1946): "Desde Bilac I Somos
internacionalistas e portugueses júniors." Olavo Bilac was a Parnassian poet.
14. On the symbolism of cannibal rites, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Araweté. From
the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 301.
15. Consult the comparative analysis of Marjorie Kilgour, From Communion to Canni-
balism (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).
16. Consult for example, Couto de Magalhães (1837-98), O Selvagem; José de Anchieta
(1534-97), autos; Antônio Vieira (1608-97), sermons; Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1585-1652),
A Conquista Espiritual and Arte, Bocabulario, Tesoso y Catecismo de la lengva gvarani; José
Veríssimo (1857-1916), Cenas da Vida Amazônica and Estudos Amazônicos; Basílio da Gama
(1740-95), O Uraguai (1769).
17. José de Alencar (1829-77), writer and politician of Ceará, whose Indianist novel O
Guarani (1857) was the basis for Carlos Gomes's (1836-96) opera, which opened in the Teatro
alia Scala, Milan, on 2 December 1870.
18. Arare example is Pierre-Louis Duchartre's book of legends, illustrated by Vicente do
Rêgo Monteiro, Légendes, croyances et talismans des Indiens de l'Amazone (Paris: Tolmer,
1923).
19. Even Henry Thomas Buckle's theories of racial inferiority were posited on the natural
excess of the Brazilian land over the powers of individuais in an indigenous, black, or
miscegenated population.
20. The paraphrased "translation" of this verse offered in recent editions of the manifesto
must be viewed as pure fantasy. What interested Andrade was certainly the repetition in
inverted structure of a "concrete" poem stripped to its essential four words.
21. See David T. Haberly, "Introduction," in Three Sad Races (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), 1-9.
22. Consult Thomas Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian
Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 10-ll. Hereafter abbreviated BW
23. The unpublished translations of Brazilwood Poetry are by Richard Zenith, prepared
for the UNESCO Archives edition of Andrade's work in English (University of Pittsburgh
Press, forthcoming).
 M O D E R N I S M 1 modernity
I I O The originais were published in Pau Brasil (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1925). The original of this
poem reads:

o orgulho de ser branco

Na terra morena e conquistada ...
O Pão de Açúcar artificial.

24. Richard Graham, "Introduction," in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940
(Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1990), 3.
25. Romero published an influential history of Brazilian literature in 1888 and was one of
the early researchers ofpopular and folkloric traditions. Charles R. Boxer further explains the
terms used for mixed bloods in colonial Brazil: "Mameluco, cross-breed between Amerindian
mother and white father; Mestiço (a) male offspring of a black and white sexual union, (b)
sometimes used for male offspring of an Amerindian and white sexual union; Caboclo, used
variously for (a) cross-breed ofwhite and Amerindian stock, (b) domesticated Amerindian, (c)
any low-class person, usually of colour" (Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire
[Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], 87).
26. Mário de Andrade, Macunaíma (São Paulo: Cupolo, 1928). Andrade's "rhapsody,"
composed in six days in 1926 on a São Paulo plantation, praises the jungle and condemns the
city in a magical folktale of linguistic, thematic, and narrative virtuosity. lts Amazonian lore is
based on an ethnography of the Taulipang and Arekuná Indians of the upper Northwest Ama-
zon published in Germany in 1924 by Theodor Koch-Grünberg, whose fieldwork dates from
1911-13. The subject of a large bibliography, Macunaíma is considered the major novel of
Brazilian modernism and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Latin American litera-
ture. The English translation published by Random House is considered a failure, and the
work is currently being retranslated.
27. Richard Graham states in his Introduction that even those who opposed racism
sometimes unwittingly repeated its premises and categories, often unconsciously or through
reverse racism (Graham, The Idea ofRace, 3). The concept of the lack of indigenous culture as
vacant space dates to the sixteenth century. The Jesuit Nóbrega wrote in 1551 that "these
heathen ... believe in nothing, andare therefore like a sheet of paper on which we can write
what we like .... " (Translated and quoted in Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial
Empire, 88-89).
28. The phrase has not been successfully translated into English. The preguiçais a sloth,
and the exclamation sums up Macunaíma's cosmic laziness as a view of life. In the "Cannibal
Manifesto," laziness is one of the keys to a natural and vital energy, an excess perhaps
associated by the authors with other forms of being: "Lazy in the mapamundi of Brazil."
29. This argument is presented in Marianna Torgovnick, Cone Primitive: Savage
Intellects, Modem Lives (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 244.
30. The Portuguese term mestiço signifies any racially mixed category, and is therefore
different in meaning from the more specific Spanish term mestizo (Indian and European).
31. Oswald de Andrade, "Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil," Correio da Manhã (18 March
1924). The English translations are "Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto," trans. Stella de Sá Rego,
Latin American Literary Review 14 (1986), 184-87, and Zenith's manuscript.
32. "Cabralin" refers to Pedro Alvares Cabral, who discovered Brazil while on his way to
India in 1500. Other cultural references: carnaval is a mardi-gras celebration with roots in
ancient ceremony;favelas are slum dwellings; the sertão is an interior geographical region of
dry brushland, associated with the São Francisco river and the Northeast, with conservative
cultural and linguistic practices rnixing indigenous !ore with Iberian folk traditions. Vatapá is a
recipe from Bahia of Afro-Brazilian origin whose main ingredients are cashew nuts, shrimp,
and palrn oil (azeite de dendê).
33. Richard Morse compares the intense physical involvement o f the Brazilian blacks in a
cultural perspective with the cool North American mechanization of William Carlos
Williarns's "red wheelbarrow" in "Triangulating Two Cubists: William Carlos Williarns and
 JA c K s o N 1 three glad races

Oswald de Andrade," Latin American Literary Review 14 (1986): 175-83. 111

34. The originais are: "Outrora havia negros a cada metro de margem, para virar o rio
metálico"; and "Benedito ataca e coloca I Diretos direitos I Levou ás cordas o branco."
35. The originais read:

"caso"
A mulatinha morreu
E apareceu
Berrando no moinho
Socando pilão

and:

"pai negro"
Cheio de rótulas
Na cara nas muletas
Pedindo duas vezes a mesma esmola
Porque só enxerga uma nuvem de mosquitos.

36. The original reads:

Quando o português chegou

Debaixo duma bruta chuva

Vestiu o índio
Que penal
Fosse uma manhã de sol
o índio tinha despido
o português.

37. The original reads:

"noite no Rio"
Uma mulata passa nas Avenidas
Como uma rainha de palco
Há um milhão de maxixes
Na preguiça ...
Que vem do fundo da colônia.

38. The original reads:

"as moças da gare"

Eram três ou quatro moças bem moças e bem gentis
Com cabelos mui pretos pelas espáduas
E suas vergonhas tão altas e tão saradinhas
Que de nós as muito bem olharmos
Não tínhamos nenhuma vergonha.

39. For an analysis of the philosophical dimensions of Brazilian modernism, see Eduardo
Jardim de Moraes, A Brasílidade Modernista (Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1978).
40. A direct influence between cannibalism and aesthetics is suggested by Paulo
Medeiros ("Delectable Structures: Consumption and Textuality in the Western Tradition''
[Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1990], 189).
41. For an exposition of the theoretical and literary parameters of Andrade's manifesto,
see Paulo Medeiros's essay on the cannibalistic text in "Delectable Structures"; also consult
Benedito Nunes, "Antropofagia ao alcance de todos."
42. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture.
 M O D E R N I S M I modernity
I 12 43. John R. Cooley writes, "All primitivism involves wish fulfillment and by consequence
a sentimental disregard for the facts of primitive existence or for the persons being
'primitivized' .... The white writer as primitivist simplifies and stylizes li fe in nature not so
much to understand 'primitive character' as to rationalize and presumably to clarify his own
experience, to justify his racial attitudes, or to supplement his cultural needs" (Savages and
Naturals: Black Portraits by White Writers in Modem American Literature, [Newark: Univer-
sity of Delaware Press, 1982], 176). ·
44. An essay on the concept of primitivism as a flaw in Western perception, as well as a
gap through which to observe bizarre psychic mechanisms, can be found in Torgovnick's Cone
Primitive. Antropofagia, however, was more firmly theoretical and analytical than her ex-
amples of Henry M. Stanley, Tarzan, Joseph Conrad, andO. H. Lawrence.
45. When indigenous peoples finally wished to speak for themselves, national intellectu-
als often began to talk of an "Indian problem." The point is emphasized in Alan Knight, The
Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).