July 25, 2022

Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship

Catarina Martins

This project aims to build a counterpoint between the semantic fields of Antropofagia and Afro-Brazilian literature, linking them respectively with the imaginaries of mestizaje and black consciousness, in order to interrogate the processes of construction and negotiation of an idea of the Brazilian nation. The metaphor of "anthropophagy", coined by Oswald de Andrade to symbolise the process of appropriation of the coloniser's culture by the colonised, was revolutionary for having placed a heterogeneous, fluid and anti-Cartesian identity as the core of Brazilian nationality. This seemed to deconstruct a Eurocentric ideal of the nation, in which it was conceived as fixed and homogeneous, but at the same time opened up possibilities for conceptualising very refined mechanisms of governing differences. Today, the anthropophagic imaginary finds possibilities of questioning and displacement within the literature produced by writers of African descent. The latter refer to forms of strategic essentialism, resuming the discussion on Brazilian identity from the perspective of racially and ethnically marginalized subjects within society as well as in the national narrative.

Keywords: authorship, race, nation, literary canon, Epistemologies of the South