Brazilian Modernists and the Avant-Garde: Transcultural Modernism in the Postcolonial Periphery

This essay traces the reception of and reaction to mainstream European Avant-Garde Cubism and Futurism in Brazil, which coincided with the emergence of Brazilian Modernism, officially launched with the Modern Art Week of São Paulo in February 1922. According to Benita Parry’s characterisation of postcolonial peripheral modernisms, the extent and intensity of the asymmetries between modernism and modernity in those contexts engenders cultural production with a heightened degree of formal complexity and stylistic heterogeneity. This essay 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, as case studies of the dynamics of aesthetic modernism in a peripheral postcolonial context. The first section 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 a paroxysmal response to the accelerated modernisation of São Paulo in the first decades of the twentieth century and a critique of the ‘coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history’ characteristic of what Jameson calls an ‘uneven moment of social development’. The multiple temporalities attendant on peripheral modernisms are also represented in Tarsila’s paintings from 1923–1924 and in Oswald’s poetry collection Pau-Brasil [Brazilwood] (1925), both of which transpose Cubism to a Brazilian context by incorporating cosmopolitan and indigenous cultural and formal elements. The concluding section appraises two 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 resistance to European cultural hegemony.