INTRODUCTION
The (de)formations of Brazilian Modernism
by
Pedro Daher
Rodrigo Cardoso
Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The world's single law. Disguised expression of all individualism, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupi or not tupi, that is the question.
- Oswald de Andrade, Anthropophagous Manifesto, 1928
The periphery unites us through love, pain, and color. From the alleys and unseen paths will arise the voice that screams against the silence that punishes us. From the hills emerges a beautiful and intelligent people, galloping against the past. In favor of a clean future, for all Brazilians
- Sérgio Vaz, Peripheric Anthropophagy Manifesto, 2007
Since the spark that led to the organization of this issue was the celebration of the 100th anniversary of São Paulo’s 1922 Week of Modern Art (Semana de Arte Moderna), we thought about beginning with a small and quick speculative exercise by looking at two manifestos 80 years apart. In 1928, six years after the Week of Modern Art took place, Oswald de Andrade published his Manifesto Antropófago (commonly translated as the Cannibalist Manifesto). In 2007, Sérgio Vaz, a Brazilian poet from the state of Minas Gerais, but residing in São Paulo, organized the Semana de Arte Moderna da Periferia (the Periphery’s Week of Modern Art), during which he published the Manifesto da Antropofagia Periférica (Peripheric Anthropophagic Manifesto). As the epigraphs above indicate, both writings are, among other things, very much concerned about “us” and the “future”. Vaz and de Andrade, separated by time and united by space, urge Brazil to arise to what it somehow already is. Vaz’s event and writing are a deeply critical engagement with the history of Brazilian culture generally and modernismo specifically – it questions the centrality of canons and elite European artistic thought and practice within Brazil, the disregard for the actual lives of the country’s marginalized populations (the poor, black, and indigenous, as Mangueira’s 2019 samba-enredo emphasized[1]), and the invocation of mere abstractions when engaging with said population’s knowledge, wisdom, and presence. It also explicitly states and articulates against the “barbarity of not having libraries, movie theaters, museums, theaters, and accessible spaces for cultural production” (Vaz). In a somewhat similar sense, de Andrade also criticized the contemporary artistic practices of his time and indicated that Brazil only needed to look at, and perhaps for, itself to realize its vast richness in thought, knowledge, and cultural practice. Furiously and cooperatively, they aim at a simultaneous rebuke and redeployment of the elite European discourses and practices. Both suggest that what Brazil needs to find itself is already there.
The divergence is, of course, the how of the arriving at said moment of justice. Perhaps the main difference to be pointed at is that Vaz looks at the concrete manifestations of daily life, while de Andrade pursues the nation through a more abstract-inclined mode, as it were. Albeit this dichotomy between “concrete” and “abstract” is problematic, limiting, and perhaps even arguably false, it is a way of highlighting that the former speaks from the life he knows in his daily experience while the latter departs from a more intellectual dimension by mostly mobilizing readings and contemporary arts to find his Brazilian project. This is not about stating that one has found the true Brazil while the other hasn’t. What matters more is the distinct approaches and how Vaz’s engagement with daily knowledge produces a text which does not rely on projecting other(s) but that departs from daily struggles to demarcate the terrain of a mode of modernity that would have brought its marginalized populations into the center (and hence, hopefully, ending marginalization as such). In de Andrade, because he is more “stuck” in the machinations of the imagination, the result is a concept that seems not to go to the encounter of the other(s) proclaimed to be at the center of the project. If, for Vaz, what will bring Brazil to its proper reality is the life of the periphery, in the 1920’s paulista modernism, Brazil as periphery embracing its multiple national knowledges should achieve that same result. However, the centrality of that modernism ended up being part of that opposite reality, which it was arguably trying to avoid. It built, unwillingly or not, a canonic space that contributed to the erasure of the marginalized populations and knowledges that it intended to uplift or, at least, transport to a more central dimension of Brazilian cultural production and thought. The tensions and contradictions of Brazil’s Modernismo have been, and continue to be, highlighted and reviewed. Its effacements and dreams are questioned by a multitude of voices. Proof of that centrality and critical tension is the large number of events and publications dedicated to the centenary of the Modern Art Week last year, beginning with a joint year-long critical seminar by the São Paulo Pinacothèque, the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) and University of São Paulo's Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC-USP) (1922: Modernismos em debate, March-December, 2021, available on YouTube) and followed in 2022 by a multitude of events held at several universities and art institutions in Brazil and worldwide. Some of them proposed critical reviews based on post- and decolonial, feminist, and critical race theories as well readings from the periphery and from outside the Rio-São Paulo axis, while many others dedicated themselves to the already long-established celebratory tradition of erecting a national monument for the centenary event.
It is impossible to deny the week’s centrality and importance in the imagination of a Brazilian culture, as well as the movement’s (even if uneven) attention to the popular. However, it is very much within the realm of possibility to think about Brazilian modernity based on productions from other regions outside the hegemony of the Southeast; to reflect and indicate how Modernismo contributed and contributes to the discourses of racism and machismo in Brazil; to investigate which links can be found between the discourses of modernism and social structures of power and hegemony in the country; as well as to explore the potentials that Modernismo opened up and was unable to realize by suggesting and imagining how to rescue its limitations and possibilities through critically engaged thought and practice. With that in mind, this dossier aims to contribute with that intense and productive debate in the context of English-language Brazilianism with a selection of original texts, from both young and renowned, US and Brazilian, academics and artists.
BRIEF HISTORICAL REVIEW
By the end of the 1910s, 30 years after the abolition of slavery, Brazil had a strongly agricultural economy based on the same monocultural structure inherited from its colonial formation. However, a few urban centers were beginning an industrial development, accompanied by a heavy influx of European and Japanese immigration that made part of eugenic whitening policies of the Republic, aimed at substituting black laborers, which were then pushed to the peripheries of those developing urban centers. These fluxes and confluences of peoples, along with news and experiences of important technological, cultural, and political developments worldwide, converged to the emergence of avant-garde ideas and experiences in the country. If, as Perry Anderson argues[2], the contrast between a largely traditional and provincial environment and the dynamic of accelerated modernization, with its new technologies and circulation of different languages and cultures, is what provided the ground for the emergence of the avant-gardes, São Paulo, Brazil's fastest growing city at the time, proved to be a fertile soil for such adventures. Throughout the 1910s, avant-garde tendencies started developing in the city[3] culminating, in February, 1922, with the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), held at São Paulo's Municipal Theater. The event was organized by artists, cultural agitators and patrons and promoted new and modern aesthetic expressions against the parnassian classicism that hegemonized the cultural scene at the time. It raised little attention when it happened, but in the following years many of its participants went on to become recognized artists nationwide, while São Paulo consolidated its political and economic hegemony in the country. Slowly and retroactively[4], the Modern Art Week became a founding myth for modern art and culture in Brazil, obfuscating and silencing other important modernist and avant-garde experiences in other parts of the country as well as voices of dissent within the movement and its historiography.
Since the last decades of the 20th-century, Brazilian artistic and literary historiography generally describes the 1920s São Paulo Modernismo as a central, defining moment in Brazilian culture[5]. According to that narrative, the 1922 Modern Art Week produced an earthquake in an otherwise backwards and provincial culture, unleashing the powers of artistic and literary modernity, avant-gardism, experimentalism, national and popular authenticity, self-consciousness, and the much desired dialogue between the local and the universal (i.e. the European). That narrative was further developed with the creation of the public university system in Brazil, and the emergence of the first professional and academic literary critics such as Lourival Gomes Machado, Antonio Candido, Gilda de Mello e Souza, Aracy do Amaral, and others, in the 1950s and 1960s, in the State University of São Paulo (USP), which became a central reference in the formation of other universities’ curricula throughout the country. In this way, describing the Modern Art Week and São Paulo's modernismo as the singular event that changed and produced Brazilian culture anew became a model of Brazilian literary history taught in schools and in literature courses across the country’s universities and internationally. As such, it also served as the basis for the development of culture and the arts from the 1950s to the 1990s, influencing important movements such as Concretismo, Teatro Oficina and Tropicalia[6]. The canonization of the São Paulo modernismo made names such as Mário de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral, and Oswald de Andrade familiar to the general public across the nation as symbols of Brazilian art and literature.
As we mark and reflectively celebrate the 100th anniversary of the São Paulo Modern Art Week, the issues and debates of the present invite us to look critically at the past and ask ourselves what this canonization process has produced in Brazilian history and culture. The decentralization of the production of knowledge achieved through the heavy and decentralized investment in higher education in Brazil during the Workers Party (PT) governments in the 2000s, the 10th anniversary of affirmative action policies in public higher education celebrated in 2022, and the development of feminist and postcolonial critiques, as well as critical race studies, have led to the appearance of a multitude of different narratives, reflections, and views regarding the development of a modern culture in Brazil. Many important academic works have been challenging consolidated narratives on Brazilian modernism in recent years, such as Zita Nunes’ Cannibal Democracy, Lucia Sa’s Rainforest literatures, Fred Coelho’s “A Semana de cem anos”, and, more recently, Rafael Cardoso’s Modernity in black and white. The revision of modernism has also been the subject of artists and writers such as Denilson Baniwa, Val Souza, Jaider Esbell, who figure in this issue and of many others.
INTRODUCING THIS SPECIAL ISSUE
Revisiting Brazilian Modernismo: a contra-assessment of the centenary offers important contributions to this ongoing debate, presenting new approaches and critical readings of the historiography of modernismo as well as a mapping of contemporary academic and artistic productions from Brazilian and brazilianist thinkers and creators reflecting on the movement. This issue is divided into two overarching themes: DUrval Muniz Albuquerque Junior, Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso, Flávia Vieira, Pedro Daher, and Val Souza offer critical reassessments of the 1920s historical modernism, it's authors and themes, while Laura Harris, Denilson Baniwa, Salloma Salomão, Suene Honorato, and Jaider Esbell deal with modernism's aesthetic and discursive legacies.
Durval Albuquerque Jr.’s “Dressing or undressing the Harlequin? Modernisms, regional disputes, and images of the nation in Brazil” shows how important Northeastern intellectuals, such as Câmara Cascudo and Joaquim Inojosa, aligned with Mário de Andrade's account of a history of modernism centered in São Paulo to distinguish themselves from the powerful gravitation of Gilberto Freyre’s regionalist project, thus also contributing to the unified and homogeneous view of the nation put forward by the São Paulo modernism. In “Revisiting Oswald de Andrade’s ‘technicized barbarian’”, Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso engages with Oswald de Andrade's work beyond modernism to ask what allowed the author to imagine the advent of the “technicized barbarian” in 1928 and 1950, and questions if the erasure of black people and contemporary indigenous peoples in the text of anthropophagy symbolically equate their inscription as fixed capital. In Flávia Vieira’s “Modernity in Cornélio Penna”, the reader discovers a phase of Brazilian modernism which is a rejection of both the exotic and the shallow denunciation of inequality that preceded Penna’s work, through the perception that the latter's intimate style engages deeply with the country’s social structures and the psyche of different individuals and social groups. In “One hundred years of haunting: can the Brazilian relinquish its foundations?” Pedro Daher revisits Oswald and Mário de Andrade’s work accompanied by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “‘Bahia Pêlo Negro’” and Mangueira’s 2019 samba-enredo to reflect on the creation and sustaining of the Brazilian Modern Subject and its ongoing power to haunt, hide, and articulate the country’s social-economic-cultural reality. Finally, Val Souza’s visual poem “Brazilian Remembrance” reflects on the modes of propagation of colonial, racial, and gender stereotypes in the modernist imagination by offering the reader/viewer a series of impactful images which juxtapose her body and different representations of black women in Brazilian paintings to revisit conventional art tropes while confronting the viewer with the ethical predicament in the erasure of the artist’s face.
In the second section, exploring the contradictions and tensions in the popular culture paradigm inherited from modernism, Laura Harris’ “Aesthetic Manifestations of the ‘Nobody’: Ex-votos and the Biomorphic Forms of Sonia Gomes”, engages the modernistas of 1922 by centralizing the “no-bodies” and “nobodies” of Brazil via the ex-votos sculptures of contemporary artist Sonia Gomes and their aesthetic manifestation that displaces notions of propriety connecting body and culture. Salloma Salomão’s “Artur Bispo do Rosário: Imaginary, cultural expropriation, and anti-black racism in modern Brazil” reads Bispo do Rosário’s work and life against the grain, confronting the temporalities of the diaspora, the presence of Central Africa in Brazilian culture and the psychiatric institutions as instruments of discipline and control not only of black bodies but of subjectivities and modes of life. Engaging with contemporary indigenous poetry, Suene Honorato’s “‘Be tupi’: anthropophagic contrasts in Ellen Lima’s poetry” juxtaposes and contrasts Oswald de Andrade's anthropophagy with Ellen Lima’s autoepigraph to highlight how the latter’s work brings about a diasporic, non-essentialized indigenous identity in process, and a triple questioning of the former’s concept by looking at anthropophagy as a possibility for indigenous people to resist ethnocide, affirming identities in the present and self-representation, and critique the idea of modernity itself.
Finally, both Jaider Esbell’s “Makunaima my grandparent” and Denilson Baniwa's “It is impossible to learn how to plow the land by reading books” engage with a critical rereading of Modernismo's indigenisms from Contemporary Indigenous Art's perspective. Esbell uses his experimental writing and paintings to instigate the reader to not only abandon “pre-concepts” regarding Makunaima but also to embrace a shift in consciousness and, hence, beliefs and behaviors towards (economic, social, cultural, political) justice for the country’s indigenous populations. Meanwhile, Denilson Baniwa contrasts Esbell’s propositions, confronting modernist modes of appropriation of indigenous cultures and traditions with the lived experience of indigenous peoples. In an assertive rereading of Makunaima and Anthropophagy, the artist draws attention to the need to pay back what has been expropriated in colonial traditions of representation.
The combination of both academic and artistic contributions imbues the issue with multiple affective possibilities of imagination and critical potential. Exploring different time-spaces with their distinct languages and formats, the texts provide the reader with a complex and nuanced take on modernism from a multitude of perspectives and approaches. Both through discourse analysis and textual close readings and aesthetic interventions and cultural questionings, the artists and scholars gathered here bring forth issues and approaches that keep resonating after the texts end. After engaging with one of the interruptions proposed here, the reader is asked to remain open to the reality that attached meaning is always-already constructed and to the need to permanently remind oneself not to consume things immediately. That is, of not assuming a (cultural) thing is there for the taking and for one’s own self-establishment. If dominant modes of reading Brazilian modernism and the readings produced by the (paulista) modernism of 1922 have been established, that simply indicates that a society of domination exists and must be overcome via the proliferation of readings and practices that point to a life not dictated by domination itself. The contributors here ask the reader to grasp and embrace the rupture they offer. Although each work presented brings forth their own grammar, they all aim at questioning the ongoing effects of Brazil’s becoming as a nation written in the limits and possibilities of the modernist project, and how to ultimately envision, by practicing, in the now, a future which is based on economic, cultural, political, and social justice.
[1] See Willmersdorf, Pedro. “‘Índios, negros e pobres’: bandeira de desfile campeão da Mangueira vira peça de museu” (O Globo, 2021).
[2] See Anderson, Perry. Modernity and Revolution, New Left Review, I/144, Mar/Apr 1984.
[3] See Brito, Mário da Silva. História do Modernismo Brasileiro: antecedentes da semana de arte moderna. Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 1974.
[4] See Coelho, Frederico. “A Semana De Cem Anos”. ARS (São Paulo), vol. 19, nº 41, abril de 2021, p. 26-52, doi:10.11606/issn.2178-0447.ars.2021.184567.
[5] See, for example, Candido, Antonio. "Literatura e Cultura de 1900 a 1945", Literatura e Sociedade, Rio de Janeiro, Ouro sobre Azul, 2011; or Bosi, Alfredo. História concisa da Literatura Brasileira, São Paulo, Cultrix, 2015.
[6] Concretismo was a Brazilian avant-garde literary movement led by Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari. Inspired by the São Paulo 1920s modernismo as well as other international avant-garde movements, it proposed a new approach to writing in relation to the spatiality of the word and to other arts and fields such as design, music and information technology. See Kenneth Jackson (ed.), Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet, Oxford, Oxford University Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2005. Tropicalia was a wide-ranging Brazilian avant-garde movement from the 1960s and 1970s encompassing theater, visual and performing arts, poetry, and, most notably, music, acting as a defining influence in Brazilian mass culture in the late 20th century. See Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicalia and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
