Abstract

This paper traces the reception of and reaction to mainstream European Avant-Garde Cubism and Futurism in Brazil, which coincided with the emergence of Brazilian Modernism at the time of the Modern Art Week of São Paulo in February 1922. It scrutinises Benita Parry’s claim that the extent and intensity of the asymmetries between modernism and modernity in postcolonial peripheral modernisms engenders cultural production with a heightened degree of formal complexity and stylistic heterogeneity through case studies of works produced in a postcolonial Brazilian context.

Specifically, it appraises the representation and critique of asymmetries arising from uneven modernisation and cultural (neo)colonialism in modernist poetry, manifestos and visual works produced by three key figures of the first Brazilian modernism, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral. Firstly, it examines the dialogic relationship between Mário’s Paulicéia Desvairada [Hallucinated City] (1922) and Italian futurism, arguing that this inaugural poetry collection can be regarded as both a paroxystic response to the accelerated modernisation of São Paulo in the first decades of the twentieth century and a critique of the condition that Jameson identifies as the ‘coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history’ characteristic of modernism’s ‘uneven moment of social development’.

The multiple temporalities attendant on peripheral modernisms are also examined in Tarsila’s paintings from 1923-24 and in Oswald’s poetry collection Pau-Brasil [Brazilwood] (1925), both of which rehearse Cubism in a Brazilian context by incorporating cosmopolitan and indigenous cultural and formal elements. Finally, it appraises key cultural texts of the first Brazilian modernism, Oswald’s ‘Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil’ [Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto] (1924) and ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ [‘Cannibalist Manifesto’] (1928), as enunciations of a discourse of counter-hegemonic resistance to European cultural hegemony and cultural (neo)colonialism.

Bio

Patrícia Silva is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra and the Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Queen Mary University of London, researching ‘Modernism as a Transcultural Phenomenon: Transatlantic Networks, Transits and Exchanges between Euro-American and Luso-Brazilian Sites of Modernism’ (2013 -), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science & Technology (FCT). She holds a PhD from King’s College London (2009) and was visiting research fellow at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London (2010-2012).

She is the author of Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles (2010) and has published on Pessoa, Modernism, Comparative Literature, and Visual Cultures in the peer-reviewed journals Pessoa Plural, Portuguese Studies, Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, Comparative Critical Studies, Colóquio-Letras, Dedalus, and Cadernos de Literatura Comparada. Other recent publications include chapters on Pessoa and Yeats in Fernando Pessoa’s Modernity without Frontiers: Influences, Dialogues, Responses (2013), on the reception of Darwin by Eça de Queiroz in The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe: Literary and Cultural Reception (2014), on Portuguese and British modernist magazines in 1915: O Ano do Orpheu (2015), and on Brasília as a modernist utopia and its literary and film representation in Alternative Worlds: Blue-sky Thinking Since 1900 (2015).

Atividade no âmbito do Núcleo de Estudos sobre Humanidades, Migrações e Estudos para a Paz | NHUMEP