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Cannibal Logic: Latin America Under the Sign of an Other Thinking

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Cannibal Logic: Latin America Under the Sign of an Other Thinking CANNIBAL LOGIC: LATIN AMERICA UNDER THE SIGN OF AN OTHER THINKING Marco Alexandre de Oliveira A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: Federico Luisetti Walter Mignolo Gregg Flaxman Monica Rector Juan Carlos González-Espitia © 2012 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT MARCO ALEXANDRE DE OLIVEIRA: Cannibal Logic: Latin America Under the Sign of an Other Thinking (Under the co-direction of Federico Luisetti and Walter Mignolo) This dissertation presents the theory and practice of a cannibal logic as the sign of an other thinking in Latin America. Following the argument of an essay by the Brazilian poet and critic Haroldo de Campos, which discusses the relations between Latin American and European art and culture in terms of both “dialogue” and “difference,” it departs from the premise that a significant part of the imaginary of the Americas throughout the history of modernity as coloniality has been marked by the emblematic figure of the cannibal and the rhetorical trope of cannibalism as a discourse of otherness. As such, it explores the cannibalization of the cannibal and/or cannibalism in Brazilian modernismo and the formulation of a post-modernist “anthropophagic reason” by the “new barbarians” that would herald the emergence of an other (neo) avant-garde under development in Latin America. It thereby considers the evolution of both a “new poetry,” which would seek to deconstruct Eurocentrism, and a “new cinema,” which would aim to decolonize the Third World, as productions of a “new civilization” and as illustrations of a revolutionary (cultural) cannibalism that is ultimately contextualized in post-modern and post-colonial theory and criticism. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would hereby like to acknowledge Federico Luisetti and Walter Mignolo for their invaluable direction, Gregg Flaxman for his instrumental orientation, Juan Carlos González- Espitia for his insightful contribution, and Monica Rector for her helpful participation. I would also like to thank Eric Downing for his significant inspiration, and both Augusto de Campos and Anna Karinne Ballalai for their gracious accommodation. I would finally like to express my appreciation to Celso de Oliveira, Bernie de Oliveira, and Teresa Barreto Domingues for all their love and support. iv DEDICATION In honor of Samuel Ashley Brown (1923-2011), devourer of art and culture. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 1 II. NEW BARBARIANS .......................................................................................... 8 OF CANNIBALS ................................................................................................. 11 MODERN(IST) ANTHROPOPHAGY ..................................................................... 53 ALEXANDRIAN BARBARIANS ...........................................................................104 III. NEW POETRY ....................................................................................................135 VERBIVOCOVISUAL IDEOGRAMS ......................................................................138 (RE)CANNIBALIZATION OF A POETICS ..............................................................184 UNIVERSAL (DE)SIGNS .....................................................................................239 IV. NEW CINEMA ....................................................................................................260 CAMERA(S) IN HAND, IDEA(S) IN THE HEAD .....................................................263 AN EZTHETICS OF HUNGER ...............................................................................322 TRICONTINENTAL MO(VE)MENT ......................................................................363 V. NEW CIVILIZATIONS ......................................................................................390 TRANSCULTURATION / HYBRIDIZATION ...........................................................392 DECONSTRUCTION / DETERRITORIALIZATION ..................................................411 DECOLONIZATION ............................................................................................422 (POST)SCRIPT ..................................................................................................429 vi REFERENCES ......................................................................................................... 438 vii Cannibal Logic: Latin America under the Sign of an Other Thinking Marco Alexandre de Oliveira Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia (“Anthropophagy”) – 1929 “But we never admitted the birth of logic among us.” – Oswald de Andrade “Somewhere between sacrifice and playfulness, prison and transgression, submission to the code and aggression, obedience and rebellion, between assimilation and expression – there, in this apparently empty space, its temple and its clandestinity, is where the anthropophagous ritual of Latin American discourse is constructed.” – Silviano Santiago INTRODUCTION “Perhaps these studies had amounted to nothing. But they are very close to that nothing which alone makes it possible for something to be useful […] This is the resolute, fanatical mien which students have when they study; it is the strangest mien imaginable” – Walter Benjamin “There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless.” – Jorge Luis Borges This dissertation explores the theory and practice of a cannibal logic in Latin American art and culture. It appropriates the argument and transforms the title of an essay by the Brazilian poet and critic Haroldo de Campos, “Da razão antropofágica: A Europa sob o signo da devoração” (“Anthropophagic Reason: Europe Under the Sign of Devoration”), which discusses the relations between Latin American and European culture in terms of both “dialogue” and “difference.” It departs from the premise that a significant part of the imaginary of the Americas throughout the history of modernity as coloniality has been marked by the emblematic figure of the cannibal and the rhetorical trope of cannibalism as a discourse of otherness. As such, representations of the cannibal and/or cannibalism are present in cartography, ethnography, and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and in art and literature from the Baroque to Romanticism. If the origins of the figure of the cannibal and the trope of cannibalism reveal a European fantasy of an Amerindian reality, the advent of an alternative modernism in Latin America would in turn reflect the transfiguration of the cannibal from taboo into totem, and the transformation of cannibalism from a discourse of colonialism to a counter- discourse of decolonization. Modernism was both a moment and a movement marked by experimentations in language, and especially the representation of language in writing. At the limits or margins of such a mo(ve)ment, writing extended beyond the boundaries of literature into the sphere of the visual arts, and the apparent schism between writing and drawing, word and image, was challenged by a realization of the materiality of the word as image and the potentiality of the image as text. Such a visualization of writing would, as such, describe a culminating moment in the history of a modern era that had subordinated the written to the spoken word, for it signaled the re-emergence of writing as a graphic art. From pictographic and logographic techniques to photographic and cinematographic technologies, new forms of writing reflected radical changes in the arts that had occurred under the banners of innovative avant-garde movements and the signatures of inventive artists. Inasmuch as Modernism developed concurrently in Europe and the Americas, though the former traditionally constitutes the “center” and the latter the “periphery,” the innovations of Latin American artists, writers, and/or movements are characterized not only by various forms of dialogue with, and response to, European modernism and the avant-garde, but also by a revolutionary form of cultural “cannibalism” which describes and/or prescribes a subversive practice of critical appropriation and original transformation. Ultimately, a convergence of developments in art, literature, and cinema inscribes difference and/or otherness at the center 2 of an eccentric Latin American identity-as-alterity that rewrites, or redraws, its own alter- native image of a New World. If innovations in the arts have indeed graphed the very limits and margins of writing, what of the new writing that emerges or develops at the outer limits and margins of modern Occidental culture? How is this writing different, and how does it communicate an other language? As a study of the new forms of language and/or modes of writing developed by an other (neo) avant-garde in Latin America, this dissertation is limited to a discussion of the (cultural) cannibalism exemplified by the “new poetry” and “new cinema” of the “new barbarians” of a “new civilization.” The term “new barbarians” refers to the Latin American artists and/or writers who are cannibalizing their European counterparts, here in the forms of Concrete Poetry and Cinema Novo, while the term “new civilization” refers to the culture(s) of a New World re-created by the theory and practice of (cultural) cannibalism. Why delimit the
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