Arte no Brasil à luz da re-antropofagia

This master’s dissertation investigates the arts field in Brazil, in order to understand the historical consistency of anthropophagy as a subject still in dispute over the construction of an artistic and cultural Brazilian imaginary. Enlightened by Denilson Baniwa’s work Re-Antropofagia (2018), this dissertation proposes to investigate how the anthropophagous became a central character of the modernist textuality, and how the acclaim of Sao Paolo’s modernism, from where the Manifesto Antropofago (1928) emerged in Oswald de Andrade’s writing, collaborated with a series of this ritual appropriations which misrepresented anthropophagy from its indigenous cannibal meaning. By that, I intend to problematize some procedures that pointed Sao Paolo’s modernism in Brazilian art historiography aiming to perceive how the anthropophagy’s appropriation as a theme in the arts field promoted a particularization of Brazilian artistic experience. Paradoxically, the consistency of Oswald’s argument to free the emerging artistic production In Brazil from a civilizational mirroring logic also ended up centralizing events and movements that happened in Sao Paolo in a historiography of Brazilian art, which became hegemonic. Thus, I seek to note tensions brought up by Denilson Baniwa’s painting against what has become a dominant version of Brazil’s art history and also perceive how it tied a colonialist variant of the History of Brazil to a Brazilian imaginary. As certain tensions in Baniwa’s work show up, those narratives predominance reveal multiple erasure processes, over the fact that the emphasis on anthropophagy in the arts field was not applied in Brazilian history to revolutionize the colonial imaginary, nor with the purpose of highlight the presence of indigenous cultures at the core of national matter, nor with the intention of making evident the contribution of non-white people in the formulation of an anthropophagic discourse which is known for having particularized for the Brazilian case its own conception of art