ABSTRACT
Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 “Cannibalist Manifesto” is particularly influential to the post-dictatorship generation. Calling for what Haroldo de Campos termed a “critical devoration of world heritage,” the Manifesto represents the first definitive postcolonial call for Brazil’s cultural sovereignty. It proposes an alternative process of cultural appropriation, one that Leslie Bary describes as challenging “the dualities of civilization/barbarism, modern/primitive, and original/derivative, which had informed the construction of Brazilian culture since the days of the colony.” By skewing long-standing structures of power, Andrade’s cultural cannibal may reassess national identity in a “dialogic and dialectic relationship” with the world. Chapter 2 traces the mark of the “Cannibalist Manifesto” on post-dictatorship productions and discusses how its tenets support a theatrical aesthetic that productively “devours” Brazilian as well as foreign intellectual and artistic sources. The author discusses two performances by Cia. dos Atores—Rehearsal: Hamlet and Andrade’s very own The Dead Woman—as well as Enrique Diaz’s Seagull Play, Cibele Forjaz’s VemVai—O Caminho dos Mortos, and Michel Melamed’s Regurgitofagia. These works confront the spectator with critical questions about power and contemporaneity in Brazil, and show how a new brand of Andrade’s “cultural cannibalism” became a significant trend on Brazil’s post-dictatorship stage.
