REVISITING BRAZILIAN MODERNISM: A COUNTER-ASSESSMENT OF THE CENTENARY THE LIVING COMMONS COLLECTIVE MAGAZINE, N. 2, JUNE 2023 Editors Pedro Daher & Rodrigo Cardoso Cover Rodrigo Cardoso Images Val Souza; Jaider Esbell; Denilson Baniwa Translations Durval Muniz Albuquerque Junior's Dressing or Undressing the Harlequin; Suene Honorato's 'Be Tupi’: anthropophagic contrasts in Ellen Lima's poetry; and Salloma Salomão Jovino da Silva's Artur Bispo do Rosario: Imaginary, cultural expropriation and anti-black racism in modern Brazil by TGA Translations, with the support of the University of California Irvine, and revised by the editors. Jaider Esbell's Makunaima my grandparent in me and Images, myth, art, contexts by Rodrigo Cardoso The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 REVISITING BRAZILIAN MODERNISM: A COUNTER-ASSESSMENT OF THE CENTENARY Throughout a 2-day symposium, the Brazilian modernist project was examined through a critical perspective by considering the canonical character of modernism in its expression in São Paulo and Southeastern Brazil in the country’s literary historiography, the exclusion of other regional expressions, the relationship of modernism with racial discourses and institutional aspects of Brazil and its peoples. How is it possible to think about Brazilian modernity based on productions from other regions outside the hegemony of the Southeast? In what ways has modernism contributed and contributes to the discourses of racism and machismo in Brazil? What links can be found between the discourses of modernism and social structures of power and hegemony in the country? What potentials did modernism open up and was unable to realize, and how could its limitations and possibilities be rescued, thought, and critically practiced? The symposium, held at UC Irvine in May 2022, brought together artists and academics who engaged with the proposed questions, among many others, through a deep critical engagement with Brazilian literature, popular aesthetic practices, philosophy, established artistic production, and social-political-economic issues. Through its multidisciplinary approach, we hope that these and other lines of inquiry become available for the ongoing project of reviewing and rethinking modes of domination, especially in Brazil, in order to arrive at justice. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: The (de)formations of Brazilian Modernism Pedro Daher & Rodrigo Cardoso p. 1-12 Reassessing Modernism Dressing or undressing the Harlequin? Modernisms, regional disputes, and images of the Nation in Brazil Durval Muniz Albuquerque Jr. p. 13-28 Revisiting Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Technicized Barbarian’ Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso p. 29-46 Modernity in Cornelio Penna Flávia Vieira p. 47-68 One hundred years of haunting: can the Brazilian relinquish its foundations? Pedro Daher p. 69-95 Brazilian Remembrance: a picturesque selection of images Val Souza p. 96-100 Reconfiguring legacies Aesthetic Manifestations of the ‘Nobody’: Ex-votos and the biomorphic forms of Sonia Gomes Laura Harris p. 101-117 It is impossible to learn how to plow the land by reading books Denilson Baniwa p. 118-126 Artur Bispo do Rosário: Imaginary, cultural expropiation and anti-black racism in modern Brazil Salloma Salomão Jovino da Silva p. 127-143 “Be Tupi”: anthropophagic contrasts in Ellen Lima's poetry Suene Honorato p. 144-160 Makunaima, my grandparent in me Jaider Esbell p. 161-172 Image, myth, art and contexts Jaider Esbell p. 173-194 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 1 INTRODUCTION: THE (DE)FORMATIONS OF BRAZILIAN MODERNISM by PEDRO DAHER AND RODRIGO CARDOSO Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The world's single law. Disguised expression of all individualism, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupi or not tupi, that is the question. - Oswald de Andrade, Anthropophagous Manifesto, 1928 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 2 The periphery unites us through love, pain, and color. From the alleys and unseen paths will arise the voice that screams against the silence that punishes us. From the hills emerges a beautiful and intelligent people, galloping against the past. In favor of a clean future, for all Brazilians - Sérgio Vaz, Peripheric Anthropophagy Manifesto, 2007 Since the spark that led to the organization of this issue was the celebration of the 100th anniversary of São Paulo’s 1922 Week of Modern Art (Semana de Arte Moderna), we thought about beginning with a small and quick speculative exercise by looking at two manifestos 80 years apart. In 1928, six years after the Week of Modern Art took place, Oswald de Andrade published his Manifesto Antropófago (commonly translated as the Cannibalist Manifesto). In 2007, Sérgio Vaz, a Brazilian poet from the state of Minas Gerais, but residing in São Paulo, organized the Semana de Arte Moderna da Periferia (the Periphery’s Week of Modern Art), during which he published the Manifesto da Antropofagia Periférica (Peripheric Anthropophagic Manifesto). As the epigraphs above indicate, both writings are, among other things, very much concerned about “us” and the “future”. Vaz and de Andrade, separated by time and united by space, urge Brazil to arise to what it somehow already is. Vaz’s event and writing are a deeply critical engagement with the history of Brazilian culture generally and modernismo specifically – it questions the centrality of canons and elite European artistic thought and practice within Brazil, the disregard for the The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 3 actual lives of the country’s marginalized populations (the poor, black, and indigenous, as Mangueira’s 2019 samba-enredo emphasized), 1 and the invocation of mere abstractions when engaging with said population’s knowledge, wisdom, and presence. It also explicitly states and articulates against the “barbarity of not having libraries, movie theaters, museums, theaters, and accessible spaces for cultural production” (Vaz). In a somewhat similar sense, de Andrade also criticized the contemporary artistic practices of his time and indicated that Brazil only needed to look at, and perhaps for, itself to realize its vast richness in thought, knowledge, and cultural practice. Furiously and cooperatively, they aim at a simultaneous rebuke and redeployment of the elite European discourses and practices. Both suggest that what Brazil needs to find itself is already there. The divergence is, of course, the how of the arriving at said moment of justice. Perhaps the main difference to be pointed at is that Vaz looks at the concrete manifestations of daily life, while de Andrade pursues the nation through a more abstract-inclined mode, as it were. Albeit this dichotomy between “concrete” and “abstract” is problematic, limiting, and perhaps even arguably false, it is a way of highlighting that the former speaks from the life he knows in his daily experience while the latter departs from a more intellectual dimension by mostly mobilizing readings and contemporary arts to find his Brazilian project. This is not about stating that one has found the true Brazil while the other hasn’t. What matters more is the distinct approaches and how Vaz’s engagement with daily knowledge produces a text which does not rely on projecting other(s) but that departs from daily struggles to demarcate the terrain of a mode of modernity that would have brought its marginalized populations into the center (and hence, hopefully, ending marginalization as such). In de Andrade, because he is more “stuck” in the machinations of the imagination, the result is a concept that seems not to go to the encounter of the other(s) proclaimed to be at the center of the project. If, for Vaz, See Willmersdorf, Pedro. “‘Índios, negros e pobres’: bandeira de desfile campeão da Mangueira vira peça de museu” (O Globo, 2021). 1 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 4 what will bring Brazil to its proper reality is the life of the periphery, in the 1920’s paulista modernism, Brazil as periphery embracing its multiple national knowledges should achieve that same result. However, the centrality of that modernism ended up being part of that opposite reality, which it was arguably trying to avoid. It built, unwillingly or not, a canonic space that contributed to the erasure of the marginalized populations and knowledges that it intended to uplift or, at least, transport to a more central dimension of Brazilian cultural production and thought. The tensions and contradictions of Brazil’s Modernismo have been, and continue to be, highlighted and reviewed. Its effacements and dreams are questioned by a multitude of voices. Proof of that centrality and critical tension is the large number of events and publications dedicated to the centenary of the Modern Art Week last year, beginning with a joint year-long critical seminar by the São Paulo Pinacothèque, the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) and University of São Paulo's Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC-USP) (1922: Modernismos em debate, March-December, 2021, available on YouTube) and followed in 2022 by a multitude of events held at several universities and art institutions in Brazil and worldwide. Some of them proposed critical reviews based on post- and decolonial, feminist, and critical race theories as well readings from the periphery and from outside the Rio-São Paulo axis, while many others dedicated themselves to the already long-established celebratory tradition of erecting a national monument for the centenary event. It is impossible to deny the week’s centrality and importance in the imagination of a Brazilian culture, as well as the movement’s (even if uneven) attention to the popular. However, it is very much within the realm of possibility to think about Brazilian modernity based on productions from other regions outside the hegemony of the Southeast; to reflect and indicate how Modernismo contributed and contributes to the discourses of racism and machismo in Brazil; to investigate which links can be found between the discourses of modernism and social structures of power and hegemony in the country; as well as to explore the potentials that Modernismo opened up and was unable to realize by suggesting and imagining how to rescue its limitations and possibilities through critically engaged thought and practice. With The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 5 that in mind, this dossier aims to contribute with that intense and productive debate in the context of English-language Brazilianism with a selection of original texts, from both young and renowned, US and Brazilian, academics and artists. Brief Historical Review By the end of the 1910s, 30 years after the abolition of slavery, Brazil had a strongly agricultural economy based on the same monocultural structure inherited from its colonial formation. However, a few urban centers were beginning an industrial development, accompanied by a heavy influx of European and Japanese immigration that made part of eugenic whitening policies of the Republic, aimed at substituting black laborers, which were then pushed to the peripheries of those developing urban centers. These fluxes and confluences of peoples, along with news and experiences of important technological, cultural, and political developments worldwide, converged to the emergence of avant-garde ideas and experiences in the country. If, as Perry Anderson argues 2, the contrast between a largely traditional and provincial environment and the dynamic of accelerated modernization, with its new technologies and circulation of different languages and cultures, is what provided the ground for the emergence of the avant-gardes, São Paulo, Brazil's fastest growing city at the time, proved to be a fertile soil for such adventures. Throughout the 1910s, avant-garde tendencies started developing in the city 3 culminating, in February, 1922, with the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), held at São Paulo's Municipal Theater. The event was organized by artists, cultural agitators and patrons and promoted new and modern aesthetic expressions against the parnassian classicism that hegemonized the cultural scene at the time. 2 See Anderson, Perry. Modernity and Revolution, New Left Review, I/144, Mar/Apr 1984. 3 See Brito, Mário da Silva. História do Modernismo Brasileiro: antecedentes da semana de arte moderna. Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 1974. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 6 It raised little attention when it happened, but in the following years many of its participants went on to become recognized artists nationwide, while São Paulo consolidated its political and economic hegemony in the country. Slowly and retroactively 4, the Modern Art Week became a founding myth for modern art and culture in Brazil, obfuscating and silencing other important modernist and avant-garde experiences in other parts of the country as well as voices of dissent within the movement and its historiography. Since the last decades of the 20th-century, Brazilian artistic and literary historiography generally describes the 1920s São Paulo Modernismo as a central, defining moment in Brazilian culture 5. According to that narrative, the 1922 Modern Art Week produced an earthquake in an otherwise backwards and provincial culture, unleashing the powers of artistic and literary modernity, avant-gardism, experimentalism, national and popular authenticity, self-consciousness, and the much desired dialogue between the local and the universal (i.e. the European). That narrative was further developed with the creation of the public university system in Brazil, and the emergence of the first professional and academic literary critics such as Lourival Gomes Machado, Antonio Candido, Gilda de Mello e Souza, Aracy do Amaral, and others, in the 1950s and 1960s, in the State University of São Paulo (USP), which became a central reference in the formation of other universities’ curricula throughout the country. In this way, describing the Modern Art Week and São Paulo's modernismo as the singular event that changed and produced Brazilian culture anew became a model of Brazilian literary history taught in schools and in literature courses across the country’s universities and internationally. As such, it also served as the basis for the development of culture and the arts from the 1950s to the 1990s, influencing important See Coelho, Frederico. “A Semana De Cem Anos”. ARS (São Paulo), vol. 19, nº 41, abril de 2021, p. 26-52, doi:10.11606/issn.2178-0447.ars.2021.184567. 4 5 See, for example, Candido, Antonio. "Literatura e Cultura de 1900 a 1945", Literatura e Sociedade, Rio de Janeiro, Ouro sobre Azul, 2011; or Bosi, Alfredo. História concisa da Literatura Brasileira, São Paulo, Cultrix, 2015. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 7 movements such as Concretismo, Teatro Oficina and Tropicalia.6 The canonization of the São Paulo modernismo made names such as Mário de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral, and Oswald de Andrade familiar to the general public across the nation as symbols of Brazilian art and literature. As we mark and reflectively celebrate the 100th anniversary of the São Paulo Modern Art Week, the issues and debates of the present invite us to look critically at the past and ask ourselves what this canonization process has produced in Brazilian history and culture. The decentralization of the production of knowledge achieved through the heavy and decentralized investment in higher education in Brazil during the Workers Party (PT) governments in the 2000s, the 10th anniversary of affirmative action policies in public higher education celebrated in 2022, and the development of feminist and postcolonial critiques, as well as critical race studies, have led to the appearance of a multitude of different narratives, reflections, and views regarding the development of a modern culture in Brazil. Many important academic works have been challenging consolidated narratives on Brazilian modernism in recent years, such as Zita Nunes’ Cannibal Democracy, Lucia Sa’s Rainforest literatures, Fred Coelho’s “A Semana de cem anos”, and, more recently, Rafael Cardoso’s Modernity in black and white. The revision of modernism has also been the subject of artists and writers such as Denilson Baniwa, Val Souza, Jaider Esbell, who figure in this issue and of many others. 6 Concretismo was a Brazilian avant-garde literary movement led by Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari. Inspired by the São Paulo 1920s modernismo as well as other international avant-garde movements, it proposed a new approach to writing in relation to the spatiality of the word and to other arts and fields such as design, music and information technology. See Kenneth Jackson (ed.), Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet, Oxford, Oxford University Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2005. Tropicalia was a wide-ranging Brazilian avant-garde movement from the 1960s and 1970s encompassing theater, visual and performing arts, poetry, and, most notably, music, acting as a defining influence in Brazilian mass culture in the late 20th century. See Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicalia and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 8 Introducing this special issue Revisiting Brazilian Modernismo: a contra-assessment of the centenary offers important contributions to this ongoing debate, presenting new approaches and critical readings of the historiography of modernismo as well as a mapping of contemporary academic and artistic productions from Brazilian and brazilianist thinkers and creators reflecting on the movement. This issue is divided into two overarching themes: Durval Muniz Albuquerque Junior, Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso, Flávia Vieira, Pedro Daher, and Val Souza offer critical reassessments of the 1920s historical modernism, it's authors and themes, while Laura Harris, Denilson Baniwa, Salloma Salomão, Suene Honorato, and Jaider Esbell deal with modernism's aesthetic and discursive legacies. Durval Albuquerque Jr.’s “Dressing or undressing the Harlequin? Modernisms, regional disputes, and images of the nation in Brazil” shows how important Northeastern intellectuals, such as Câmara Cascudo and Joaquim Inojosa, aligned with Mário de Andrade's account of a history of modernism centered in São Paulo to distinguish themselves from the powerful gravitation of Gilberto Freyre’s regionalist project, thus also contributing to the unified and homogeneous view of the nation put forward by the São Paulo modernism. In “Revisiting Oswald de Andrade’s ‘technicized barbarian’”, Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso engages with Oswald de Andrade's work beyond modernism to ask what allowed the author to imagine the advent of the “technicized barbarian” in 1928 and 1950, and questions if the erasure of black people and contemporary indigenous peoples in the text of anthropophagy symbolically equate their inscription as fixed capital. In Flávia Vieira’s “Modernity in Cornélio Penna”, the reader discovers a phase of Brazilian modernism which is a rejection of both the exotic and the shallow denunciation of inequality that preceded Penna’s work, through the perception that the latter's intimate style engages deeply with the country’s social structures and the psyche of different individuals and social groups. In “One hundred years of haunting: The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 9 can the Brazilian relinquish its foundations?” Pedro Daher revisits Oswald and Mário de Andrade’s work accompanied by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “‘Bahia Pêlo Negro’” and Mangueira’s 2019 samba-enredo to reflect on the creation and sustaining of the Brazilian Modern Subject and its ongoing power to haunt, hide, and articulate the country’s socialeconomic-cultural reality. Finally, Val Souza’s visual poem “Brazilian Remembrance” reflects on the modes of propagation of colonial, racial, and gender stereotypes in the modernist imagination by offering the reader/viewer a series of impactful images which juxtapose her body and different representations of black women in Brazilian paintings to revisit conventional art tropes while confronting the viewer with the ethical predicament in the erasure of the artist’s face. In the second section, exploring the contradictions and tensions in the popular culture paradigm inherited from modernism, Laura Harris’ “Aesthetic Manifestations of the ‘Nobody’: Ex-votos and the Biomorphic Forms of Sonia Gomes”, engages the modernistas of 1922 by centralizing the “no-bodies” and “nobodies” of Brazil via the ex-votos sculptures of contemporary artist Sonia Gomes and their aesthetic manifestation that displaces notions of propriety connecting body and culture. Salloma Salomão’s “Artur Bispo do Rosário: Imaginary, cultural expropriation, and anti-black racism in modern Brazil” reads Bispo do Rosário’s work and life against the grain, confronting the temporalities of the diaspora, the presence of Central Africa in Brazilian culture and the psychiatric institutions as instruments of discipline and control not only of black bodies but of subjectivities and modes of life. Engaging with contemporary indigenous poetry, Suene Honorato’s “‘Be tupi’: anthropophagic contrasts in Ellen Lima’s poetry” juxtaposes and contrasts Oswald de Andrade's anthropophagy with Ellen Lima’s autoepigraph to highlight how the latter’s work brings about a diasporic, non-essentialized indigenous identity in process, and a triple questioning of the former’s concept by looking at anthropophagy as a possibility for indigenous people to resist ethnocide, affirming identities in the present and selfrepresentation, and critique the idea of modernity itself. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 10 Finally, both Jaider Esbell’s “Makunaima my grandparent” and Denilson Baniwa's “It is impossible to learn how to plow the land by reading books” engage with a critical rereading of Modernismo's indigenisms from Contemporary Indigenous Art's perspective. Esbell uses his experimental writing and paintings to instigate the reader to not only abandon “preconcepts” regarding Makunaima but also to embrace a shift in consciousness and, hence, beliefs and behaviors towards (economic, social, cultural, political) justice for the country’s indigenous populations. Meanwhile, Denilson Baniwa contrasts Esbell’s propositions, confronting modernist modes of appropriation of indigenous cultures and traditions with the lived experience of indigenous peoples. In an assertive rereading of Makunaima and Anthropophagy, the artist draws attention to the need to pay back what has been expropriated in colonial traditions of representation. The combination of both academic and artistic contributions imbues the issue with multiple affective possibilities of imagination and critical potential. Exploring different time-spaces with their distinct languages and formats, the texts provide the reader with a complex and nuanced take on modernism from a multitude of perspectives and approaches. Both through discourse analysis and textual close readings and aesthetic interventions and cultural questionings, the artists and scholars gathered here bring forth issues and approaches that keep resonating after the texts end. After engaging with one of the interruptions proposed here, the reader is asked to remain open to the reality that attached meaning is always-already constructed and to the need to permanently remind oneself not to consume things immediately. That is, of not assuming a (cultural) thing is there for the taking and for one’s own self-establishment. If dominant modes of reading Brazilian modernism and the readings produced by the (paulista) modernism of 1922 have been established, that simply indicates that a society of domination exists and must be overcome via the proliferation of readings and practices that point to a life not dictated by domination itself. The contributors here ask the reader to grasp and embrace the rupture they offer. Although each work presented brings forth their own grammar, they all aim at questioning the ongoing effects of Brazil’s becoming The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 11 as a nation written in the limits and possibilities of the modernist project, and how to ultimately envision, by practicing, in the now, a future which is based on economic, cultural, political, and social justice. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher and Cardoso 12 Quote as: Pedro Daher; Rodrigo Cardoso. Introduction: The (de)formations of Brazilian modernism. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. n.2, June 2023. p. 1 - 12 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 13 DRESSING OR UNDRESSING THE HARLEQUIN? MODERNISMS, REGIONAL DISPUTES, AND IMAGES OF THE NATION IN BRAZIL by DURVAL MUNIZ ALBUQUERQUE JÚNIOR São Paulo! comoção da minha vida... Meus amores são flores feitas de original... Arlequinal!... Trajes de losangos... Cinza e ouro... Luz e bruma... Forno e inverno morno... Elegâncias sutis sem escândalos, sem ciúmes... Perfumes de Paris... Arys! Bofetadas líricas no Trianon... Algodoal!... São Paulo! comoção da minha vida... The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 14 Galicismo a berrar nos desertos da América! Arlequinal!...Traje de losangos... Cinza e ouro... São Paulo! My life’s commotion... My loves are flowers made of original... Harlequinal!... Lozenge costumes...... Grey and gold Light and mist... Oven and warm winter... Subtle elegance without scandals, without jealousy... Parisian perfumes... Arys! Lyrical slaps on the Trianon... Cotton crop!... São Paulo! My life’s commotion... Gallicism screaming in the deserts of America! Harlequinal!... Lozenge costume... Grey and gold - Mário de Andrade, Pauliceia Desvairada The presence of the figure of the Harlequin is a constant in the poetic and literary production of Mário de Andrade (1893-1945). In his book, Pauliceia Desvairada, published in 1922, the year of the Modern Art Week, it is used to express what would be the patched, multicolored (including from the ethnic-racial perspective), plural and diverse body of the city of São Paulo. The Harlequin – a classic character from the Italian Commedia dell'Arte, a kind of jester who dresses in patchwork, with lozenges of various colors, and who, being sagacious and seductive, steals the Columbine from the wretched Pierrot in love –, is a figure that stands between the comic and the tragic, carrying a certain melancholy, a certain cynicism or nihilism, very close to representing Mário de Andrade’s own way of seeing the world. We can say the Arlequim, this composite and torn figure, is a kind of alter ego of the São Paulo intellectual. It also implicitly appears in the title of his next book of poems, published in 1926, O Losango Cáqui [The Khaki Lozenge]. The geometric figure of the lozenge is what characterizes the harlequinal being, a geometric figure resembling a square, positioned and seen upside down, the other way around, crossed, referring to the idea of disarray, out of The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 15 order and place. The character's laughable or comical personality would be indicted by his disheveled, multicolored clothing, where everything seems to be scrambled. The adjective harlequinal, a neologism often used by Mário de Andrade, will appear in his greatest work, Macunaíma, published in 1928, defining the very image of Brazil, of the Brazilian nationality. Brazil would be a harlequinal nation, that is, a nation marked, above all, by the diversity of colors, by the chromatic diversity of its body, its natural and human clothing. As a black man, Mário de Andrade pays attention to what would be the skin, the epidermis of the nation. He tends to define the national identity, consistent with the racialist theories in fashion, but in opposition to them, by racial diversity, by the mixing and miscegenation of the races that form the nationality. Macunaíma is a hero without any character because he embodies and symbolizes a nation that also lacks a precise characterization, a nation with a composite and gangly body, as was the hero of our people. The fact of being homosexual – an element that is little considered for the analysis of his work, even more than his blackness (there is an embarrassed and embarrassing silence of the faithful disciples around the theme, deemed irrelevant to the understanding of what he writes) –, added to the fact that he is black, gives Mário de Andrade the identity of a Harlequim, a buffoon. Those who, despite being at Court, frequenting the halls of palaces, sharing a table with the powerful, even having become one of them, always feel out of place, have this distant and ironic look at everything, and even of himself, always considering himself a kind of clown, a man with a masked face, who hides his true face, his true skin, under the whitewash of the rice powder and who, under the mask and only with it, lets go of the laughter and the relativizing mockery of everything that is taken seriously. Laughter that can hide tears, that can hide pain, suffering and melancholy. A character who can fascinate and seduce the public, even if he remains in absolute solitude when he leaves the center and the lights off the arena. Therefore, we must only look at Mario de Andrade’s work to find an image of the nation that emphasizes diversity, plurality, the difficulty in defining a face, a character, a spirit, an identity for a homeland marked by multiplicity, both in its ethnic composition, and in its natural landscapes, both in terms of the different processes of historical formation of its different spaces, generating deep inequalities and regional singularities, as well as in the differentiated process of modernization and in the different impacts that modernity will have on the immense territory of the country. It is common to discuss, therefore, the different images of the nation that will be elaborated by the modernist works, which will be present in the speeches of its artists and intellectuals, especially if we consider the diversity of modernist manifestations in the country. There are several images of the country that appear in these different manifestations of modernist aesthetics, in the various regional spaces into which the national territory is divided. The purpose of this text is to think, precisely, the very image of the nation that appears when we consider the different occurrences of modernism among us. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 16 Could it be that, if we look at the various modernism events that were gestated in different locations in Brazil, the Harlequin might appear again as a possible image to represent the reality that would emerge from it? The curious thing is that the realization that São Paulo and Brazil had a harlequinal face does not seem to be to the liking of the great São Paulo intellectual leadership. The cultural and artistic militancy undertaken by Mário de Andrade, throughout his career, seems to have gone against the acceptance of the patched up, fragmented, broken character of Brazilian culture. He was a militant in the sense that he worked so that São Paulo's hegemony at the national level, which was already visible on the economic and political level, could be extended to the cultural field. The very narrative that he built around the event of the Semana de Arte Moderna [Modern Art Week] and modernism, giving absolute centrality to São Paulo and silencing the participation of artists and intellectuals from other states in the movement and even in the Semana – when they appear, they do so to support the movement's core in São Paulo –, explains that in his militancy there is a desire to assassinate the Harlequin, to remove his clothes, or, at least, to dress, along with his modernist peers like the Harlequin, giving it the clothing and colors of their choice. The series of articles he published in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, in 1942, when the Semana de Arte Moderna celebrated its 20th anniversary, later bundled into the book O Movimento Modernista [The Modernist Movement], published in the same year, became the master narrative, not only to narrate the history of modernism in Brazil, but also to narrate the history of culture, literature, thought and the arts in the country. The Modern Art Week, which took place in the city of São Paulo, in February 1922, became the founding event, the myth of origin not only of modernism, but of modernity itself in the country. Everything arises and everything goes through this ephemeral event, through these five days of scandal, debates, and controversies. The city of São Paulo is erected as the nuclear space of Brazilian modernity, completely obscuring other important urban centers in the country, including its capital, Rio de Janeiro, as well as Porto Alegre, Salvador, Recife, Belém, etc. The Harlequin seems to be stripped of his clothes and, in his place, a country with a monochromatic body appears, with a pronounced navel, the protuberance of the Serra do Mar. Perhaps the image of the khaki lozenge is a faulty act, a symptom of the desire for uniformity and opaque homogeneity that motivated Mário de Andrade's cultural militancy. The Modern Art Week, in which Carioca intellectuals and artists took part, such as Graça Aranha (author of the opening conference on the modern), Villa-Lobos, Di Cavalcanti (who in addition to exhibiting 11 works was the author of the cover of the Semana's catalog), as well as Northeastern artists – such as Vicente do Rego Monteiro - began to be narrated as an exclusively São Paulo event, if not stemming from São Paulo, thanks to the version prepared by the author who saw in our Macunaímic face a problem to be resolved. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 17 The trip that Mário de Andrade took in 1927 in the company of the coffee baroness and patron of modernism, D. Olívia Guedes Penteado, her niece Margarida Guedes Nogueira and the daughter of Tarsila do Amaral, Dulce do Amaral Pinto, visiting what she called deep Brazil, the North and Northeast regions, searching for folkloric material, materials, and forms of expression said to be popular, regional and/or local, as well as his performance at the head of the Department of Culture of the city of São Paulo, which sponsored, between February and July 1938, the so-called folkloric research mission, also aimed at collecting and recording, using the most modern sound recording equipment available, the so-called manifestations of popular culture, aimed at the elaboration of a national and erudite culture, which he considered to be urgent and necessary. 1 The image of the nation that appears, not only in his speeches and works, but in his actions, and in his cultural policy projects, is of a nation that needed to be unified from a center that generates and distributes meaning to the national whole. A nation, at the same time, cosmopolitan, informed of what was happening and becoming more modern, also from a technological perspective, and focused on its cultural roots, its traditions, its materials and popular, folkloric and authentic forms of expression, to turn them into material for the elaboration of a scholarly and cultured nation, capable of producing, according to the most modern international procedures, a culture both modern and original at the same time. However, a nation seen from above, not only from the Serra do Mar, from the heights of the pretensions of hegemony and geopolitical domination of the São Paulo elites, but also, as we can see from the company he chooses for his field trips, as well as his entourage’s hosts in each state, a nation seen from above from the social and class standpoint. Mário de Andrade is an exception, a fugitive among his brothers of color who, as it happens, must deal with the ideal of whitening, and, in a way, embody this explicit project of the elites of the state where he was born and where he worked. Dedication to intellectual life was a way of getting closer to the ideal of representation of whiteness. We can see from his narratives in his travel diary, published in 1977, called O Turista Aprendiz [The apprentice tourist], that he doesn’t identify with and has little empathy for the black and mestizo men and women he meets in his wanderings. There are statements and gestures that refer to a eugenic and racist view of poor men and women, from whom he wants to extract information and artistic performances that interest him. For him, it was obvious that São Paulo was the space that should spearhead this process. In other regions of the country, in the deep Brazil, in the North and Northeast, he sought places which preserved the most authentically national cultural and artistic manifestations, the materials, and forms of expression with which he would produce culture and art that were 1 See Andrade, Mário de. O turista aprendiz. Brasília, IPHAN, 2015; Andrade, Mário de. Missão de pesquisas folclóricas: música tradicional do Norte e Nordeste. São Paulo, SESC-SP, 2006. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 18 both modern and Brazilian. Reproducing, within the country, the colonial logic that constituted it. The São Paulo intellectual, in the position of the avant-garde of cultural production, proposes to plunder the popular strata and the poorest places, which were on the outskirts of capitalist development, and their cultural riches, to give them a new value, to give them the new meaning of being representations and icons of national identity. For Mário de Andrade, the patched up and fragmented image of the nation, the carnivalesque and burlesque image of the country (remember that Mário de Andrade hated carnival, he said it was a sad party) should be replaced by a homogeneous and integral image, born of a work of transforming our diversity of realities and manifestations into the unity of a national and popular culture. São Paulo, then, represented what was best and superior in the country's present, embodying its future in advance. After all, it was there that futurism – as modernism was called by many, in its first mentions –, appeared first. He had the mission (Mário had a predilection for that word of Christian and religious origin to name his actions) of rereading the national past, of collecting what was best in it, to build a future project for the country and its culture in the present. In line with how the Northeastern intellectuals and political agents themselves invented the Northeast region, it represented, for Mário de Andrade, the colonial past, the nation’s past, where one could find this past still alive, still singing, dancing and partying in the streets, in the terreiros of farms and mills, in the voice and body of the most humble people, not yet denationalized by foreign fashions, among which, contradictorily, modernism itself could be placed, as Gilberto Freyre, his rival in the country's intellectual leadership, will do. Although he was part of a regional elite and undertook regionalist programs, Mário de Andrade, like a great part of the São Paulo intellectual elite and a great part of those who embraced modernist militancy, spoke and acted based on the concept and idea of the nation. The regionalism of São Paulo did not assume itself and was not seen as such because the political and cultural elites of that state intended to speak for the nation, to be the incarnation and spokespeople of nationality. Modernist nationalism, including that professed by intellectuals from other states in the country, was almost always a regionalism that was not assumed or seen as such. For the version of the history of modernism and Brazilian culture, elaborated by the leader of São Paulo intellectuals, to become hegemonic, to become the truth about modernism and its trajectory in the country, the intellectuals who were located in economically and politically non-hegemonic places at national level not only reproduced and passed on this version, but also placed themselves within this narrative, explaining their own intellectual and artistic trajectories based on Mario de Andrade’s narrative. In order to feel that they belonged to what would be the central spot of national culture, being part of the country's cultural avant-garde, many intellectuals and artists from these peripheries accepted the centrality of São Paulo, both in the capitalist economy and in the management of the The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 19 Brazilian State, and acted as conveyors and representatives of this narrative, which reduced modernism to a pioneering initiative of a group of intellectuals and men of letters from São Paulo, placing that city as the generator and disseminator core of the new aesthetic. As an example, we can mention the official version and established narrative around the biography of Luís da Câmara Cascudo, his intellectual trajectory and his role in Brazilian cultural life. Having been elaborated, to a large extent, both by himself and by disciples such as the folklorist Veríssimo de Melo, this narrative erases his participation, in the 1920s, in what Gilberto Freyre called the Regionalist and Traditionalist Movement (Movimento Regionalista e Tradicionalista).2 When finishing his law degree at the 100-years old Recife Law School, Cascudo not only followed, but was also part of the regional movement promoted by the Centro Regionalista do Nordeste (Northeast Regionalist Center), an institution conceived by Freyre, founded in 1924, and which brought together several generations of intellectuals and politicians around the cultural and political militancy centered around the concept of region, the Northeast region. Câmara Cascudo not only was seen attending and taking part in the weekly meetings held by the Center, according to reports of these meetings published in the pages of the newspaper Diário de Pernambuco, he was also appointed representative of the institution in Rio Grande do Norte and a member of the editorial board of the magazine Nordeste, which the association intended to publish.3 It is true that Cascudo, since the beginning of his career, at the end of the 1910s, was already in contact with the São Paulo intelligentsia, notably with Monteiro Lobato, editor of Revista do Brasil, a periodical in which he published his first studies on folklore. He was always reticent and averse to placing himself under the intellectual leadership of Gilberto Freyre, establishing a certain rivalry from an early age, for the position of intellectual leadership in the Northeast region. In 1925, invited by Gilberto Freyre to be one of the intellectuals to collaborate in the Livro do Nordeste, an insert of the 100 years commemorative edition of the Diário de Pernambuco. Freyre declined the invitation, and would also not be present as a representative of his home state in the Regionalist Congress of 1926.4 Câmara Cascudo, from an early age, contacted and started to exchange letters with Mário de Andrade (the first letter was sent on August 14, 1924, just over two years after the Modern Art Week), whom he received with great ceremony in his residence, the Principality of Tyrol, during folk studies journey undertaken by the modernist leader in 1928. He puts his car, one of the few in the city, at the disposal of the apprentice tourist and accompanies him on his journey 2 See Sales Neto, Francisco Firmino. Palavras que silenciam: Câmara Cascudo e o regionalismotradicionalista nordestino. João Pessoa, Ed. da UFPB, 2008. 3 See Albuquerque Jr. Durval Muniz de. A feira dos mitos: a fabricação do folclore e/ou da cultura popular (Nordeste, 1920-1950). São Paulo: Intermeios, 2013. 4 See Sales Neto, Francisco Firmino. Palavras que silenciam; Freyre, Gilberto & outros. Livro do Nordeste. Recife: Secretaria da Justiça/Arquivo Público Estadual, 1979. (Edição fac-similada) The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 20 through the countryside of the states of Rio Grande do Norte and Paraíba. Mário de Andrade, when registering his arrival in the city of Natal in his diary, calls it the kingdom of Cascudinho, from whom he enjoys the aristocratic hospitality (Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 224). The State President, Juvenal Lamartine, of whom Colonel Francisco Cascudo, father of the future eminent folklorist, was a cohort and friend, offers to the illustrious visitor a beach house located at Ponta do Morcego, on Areias Pretas beach, neighboring his own summer residence and that of the Cascudo family, as a gift. Câmara Cascudo will be responsible for getting rid of the annoying gift, whose paperwork was not yet formalized, when President Lamartine is overthrown by the so-called movement of the thirties, since the dubious nature of the donation and the situation of the land made the modernist chief fearful of being questioned in court. 5 According to the established version about the intellectual trajectory of Câmara Cascudo, his decision to dedicate himself to folklore studies – since until the beginning of the thirties he had dedicated himself to other fields of knowledge such as literary criticism and historiography – is attributed to a “terrible” letter sent by Mário de Andrade, in 1937. In that letter, he made serious criticisms of what Cascudo had been producing until then and advised him to leave the comfort of his hammock, look around, see the cultural manifestations of a popular and traditional character, which would be threatened with disappearance with the changes that had been taking place in the country, and suggested that he dedicate himself to collecting and studying them (Oliveira, 70).6 The publication of Vaqueiros e cantadores, in 1939, the first Brazilian book on folklore studies, is thus attributed to the influence and almost imposition of the São Paulo intellectual leader, who gained the status of a national intellectual leader. It is possible to contest this version of Cascudo's biography. This is because he launched himself in the intellectual field in the early twenties, with articles on folklore and with the intention of becoming an intellectual of national scope, as he published his articles in the most prestigious cultural journal of the time: Revista do Brasil. This even enabled his contact with Mário de Andrade, since it is their mutual interest in popular matters and forms of expression as a basis for the construction of a national culture that makes them become friends and correspondents. But the curious thing is that Cascudo himself never publicly contested this narrative about his trajectory, possibly because it made him a participant in the cultural movement that became hegemonic in the country. To be considered a first-rate modernist, a disciple and friend of the top leader of that movement, to be considered the 5 See Tércio, Jason. Em busca da alma brasileira: biografia de Mário de Andrade. São Paulo: Estação Brasil, 2019; Letter from Mário de Andrade to Luís da Câmara Cascudo, 11 de janeiro de 1931 (Acervo Ludovicus – Instituto Câmara Cascudo). 6 See, also, Letter from Mário de Andrade to Luís da Câmara Cascudo, June 9, 1937 (Acervo Ludovicus – Instituto Câmara Cascudo) The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 21 introducer of modern aesthetics in his state was a version of his intellectual life that was interesting to him (Oliveira, 67-69). Moreover, one should consider the rivalry with Gilberto Freyre, whose intellectual leadership was instrumental for the elaboration of the idea of the Northeast. For this very reason, he had enormous prestige and prominence in regional terms, in addition to becoming, notably after the publication of Casa-Grande & Senzala, in 1933 – a book that became a classic soon after it was published –, a national intellectual leadership, to the point of intending to compete with Mário de Andrade, offering in his work another image of the nation, perhaps even more harlequinal than the one diagnosed by the São Paulo writer. This rivalry can be verified in a letter sent by Câmara Cascudo to the sociologist from Apipucos, towards the end of his life. In this letter, when referring to his participation in the meetings of the Centro Regionalista do Nordeste, he seems to purposely miss the name of the institution and call it Centro Nacionalista, thus affirming what had always been an argument to distance his intellectual trajectory and his work from any Freyrean influence. That is, Cascudo’s distrust of the regionalist project and his adherence to the concept of nation as the one around which their action in the cultural and intellectual fields was made.7 Câmara Cascudo, by assuming the version of his intellectual life that made him a disciple of Mário de Andrade, also incorporated the role of someone who, when asked by the São Paulo intellectual, sends him folk material, information and data pertinent to the so-called popular traditions, so that his mentor can turn them into scholarly and artistic cultural products. By refusing to take the region as the space that delimits and gives meaning to his intellectual production, by placing everything he did as a product of the influxes of São Paulo’s modernism and placing himself as the one who brought the novelty of the Semana de Arte Moderna to his state, Cascudo contributes to undress the Harlequin and to the production of an image of a culturally unified nation, in the terms defended by Mário de Andrade. This is because even within the São Paulo modernism there was no consensus on which Brazil was desired, both from an aesthetic point of view and from a political point of view. Although they were all gathered when the Semana was held, artists and intellectuals such as Oswald de Andrade, Plínio Salgado, Menotti Del Picchia, Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti followed very different aesthetic and political paths.8 Even Câmara Cascudo, when engaging in the integralist movement in the early thirties, is politically very distant from his so-called master. 7 Letter from Luís da Câmara Cascudo to Gilberto Freyre, 1940 (Acervo da Fundação Casa de Gilberto Freyre) 8 See Amaral, Aracy and Barros, Regina Teixeira. Moderno onde? Moderno quando? A Semana de 22 como motivação. São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2021. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 22 The poet, essayist, journalist and lawyer from Pernambuco, Joaquim Inojosa (1901-1987), provides us with another example of an intellectual who was born and active in a place that was becoming peripheral and politically dependent in the capitalist development of the country, and who puts himself at the service, either consciously or not, of the São Paulo cultural hegemonical project that was spearheaded in the modernist militancy. He was still a student at the Recife Law School when he went to Rio de Janeiro, acting as secretary for an delegation of students from Pernambuco who were going to participate in the I International Congress of Students, one of the events commemorating the centenary of Brazil's independence. Therefore, in 1922 and at the age of 21, when going to São Paulo after the end of the Congress, he had the opportunity to meet, at the newspaper Correio Paulistano, some of the intellectuals who had just caused an intense cultural debate by holding the Semana de Arte Moderna. He meets Menotti Del Picchia and Oswald de Andrade and receives a copy of the Klaxon magazine and books from Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade (Oliveira, 180-189).9 The first book of modernist poems by Mário de Andrade, the recently published Pauliceia Desvairada, is the inspiration for the title of the magazine he founded as soon as he returned to Recife, aiming to publicize the new aesthetic among his peers in Pernambuco: the Mauriceia magazine. The title makes an explicit reference to the book by Mário de Andrade, which would be the most modern in terms of poetry, and, at the same time, to the Dutch Count Maurício de Nassau, a legendary figure and founder of the capital of Pernambuco, once called Mauritius city. In other words, the past and present of the modern would meet there, since, in the established version of the city's history, elaborated by local historiography, the count's management had been a factor in the birth of the city as a modern one. He seems to want to take the place of leadership of the movement in that region of the that was polarized, in economic and intellectual terms, by the city of Recife (a port where a large part of the production of neighboring states converged and a mecca for all those children of the elites who sought a university). In addition to residing in the central city of a vast area, he had family, political and intellectual connections with the state of Paraíba, as his mother, Ninfa Pessoa de Albuquerque Vasconcelos, belonged to the powerful Pessoa clan, in the municipality of Umbuzeiro. This clan headed the dominant oligarchy in the state and, for that very reason, Inojosa did part of his secondary studies at Lyceu Paraibano, in the state's capital, Paraíba do Norte (the name was changed to João Pessoa in 1930). To this end, two years later, in 1924, in the same year the Centro Regionalista do Nordeste was founded by Gilberto Freyre, Inojosa published a booklet entitled A arte moderna, a manifesto in favor of modernist aesthetics. The text affirmed the leadership of the São Paulo group in the Brazilian modernist movement and the Semana de Arte Moderna as a founding event of modern art in 9 See also Inojosa, Joaquim. O movimento modernista em Pernambuco, 1º volume. Rio de Janeiro: Gráfica Tupy, 1968. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 23 the country. I don’t think it is a mere coincidence that he chose the year 1924 to launch his manifesto in defense of São Paulo modernism. To become an intellectual leader in his city and region he had to rival Gilberto Freyre, who, since he had returned to Recife in 1923, with all the prestige of being one of the few Brazilian intellectuals with postgraduate studies, carried out at Columbia University, had become an undisputed intellectual leader, to the point of gravitating towards his surroundings literati from generations before his own, such as his own father, Alfredo Freyre. Possibly, the booklet published by Inojosa already responded and confronted Freyre’s views. Even before arriving in Recife, Freyre was already constantly criticizing modernity and modernization, in the so-called numbered articles he sent from the United States to be published in the Diário de Pernambuco. Gilberto Freyre was a critic of São Paulo modernism from the beginning. He always considered it a foreign trend, a cosmopolitan movement that disfigured his idea of a true national culture, which Brazilian art should be. Joaquim Inojosa will spend his whole life competing with Gilberto Freyre, without ever being able to have the same prominence, either nationally or locally, as his competitor. But if his militancy is not decisive to erase the regionalist and traditionalist version of modernism, led by Freyre, it contributed greatly to the hegemony of Mario de Andrade’s narrative of the movement and its centrality in the history of culture, literature, and the arts in the country. We can say that, if Mário de Andrade intended to undress the Harlequin, which was the fragmented reality of culture and intellectual and artistic production in the country, Joaquim Inojosa was, in the Northeast, an important supporter in this task of providing the country with a homogeneous single face from the cultural point of view, which the very idea of nationality seemed to require. During the period in which Brazil was under the government of Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945), the norm became that the nation should imply the production of a unity, of a homogeneous national identity, which implied the fight against regionalisms and local dissent, both in political and cultural terms. Notably, starting in the dictatorial period of the Estado Novo (1937-1945), the Vargas government will adopt a nationalist cultural policy, focusing on the need to create a national culture based on popular traditions. These would be the reserves of authenticity and cultural uniqueness in a country where the elites were foreign and cosmopolitan and were unaware and/or despised what was truly Brazilian. This affirmation of the nation as the space around which political, intellectual, and artistic action should take place implied a refusal of regionalisms, seen as dangerous and deleterious to national unity. Undressing the Harlequin becomes, at that moment, national policy. It is not a mere coincidence that nationalist intellectuals such as Mário de Andrade, Câmara Cascudo and Joaquim Inojosa sympathized with the regime and, in the case of Mário de Andrade, made part of the government, despite the initial resistance of the São Paulo elites, defeated in the so-called Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932. Câmara Cascudo even wrote a letter to the The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 24 Minister of Education Gustavo Capanema putting himself at the disposal of the government to carry out tasks in the field of culture through his studies of popular traditions. According to him, he would be capable of teaching Brazilians about their own country.10 The symnbol of this refusal to regionalisms is the ceremony held in Praça Roosevelt, on November 27, 1937, in which President Vargas himself, on the occasion of the commemorations of the National Flag Day, had all the state flags burned and replaced each of them with the Brazilian flag. They were abolished by the Constitution of 1937, a charter that legitimized the implantation of the Vargas dictatorship of the Estado Novo and which had been prepared by a single jurist: Francisco Campos. When, during the Estado Novo, Mário de Andrade publishes his narrative about the Semana de Arte Moderna and about the trajectory of modernism in Brazilian culture, he does so at a very favorable moment. The centrality that he advocates for the São Paulo movement and the image of national culture that modernism aimed to produce – a culture at the same time modern, attuned to what was avant-garde from the perspective of form and aesthetics; but that focused on themes, on national and popular content –, was the one that guided the regime's own cultural policies. 11 Gustavo Capanema, the powerful Minister of Education who held office for eleven years, between 1934 and 1945, was largely responsible for the regime's cultural activities and an enthusiast of modernism. He had the collaboration of important artists linked to the movement, such as Villa-Lobos and Cândido Portinari, even though the latter was ideologically distant from the proto-fascist orientations of the Vargas regime. The nationalist centralism of the Vargas State favored the victory of a uniform and homogenizing view of the cultural and artistic reality of the country, such as that built by the main hero of São Paulo modernism, who influenced the cultural policies of the regime and granted free transit in his offices. The Vargas regime wanted to undress the Harlequin, to the point of forbidding paintings that portrayed the black and mestizo face of the country to be exposed in international exhibitions. In the same way, it favored a cultural militancy that aimed to unify the national culture. This conjuncture completely disfavored the regionalist and traditionalist militancy initiated by Gilberto Freyre and the group he led in the Northeast. Unlike São Paulo modernism, the aesthetic that Gilberto Freyre attributed to the Regionalist and Traditionalist Movement articulated modern form with themes that refer to an idea of Brazil and the rural and colonial Northeast. The Regionalist and Traditionalist Movement would be materialized by the set of initiatives in the cultural field that he would have led since returning from his studies in the 10 See Letter from Luís da Câmara Cascudo to Gustavo Capanema, December 30, 1937 (Acervo do Ludovicus – Instituto Câmara Cascudo). 11 See Chauí, Marilena. O nacional e o popular na cultura brasileira: seminários. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1984. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 25 United States and from a trip to several European countries, where he came into direct contact with modernist artists and with their aesthetic proposals, mainly through living with his countryman, the painter Vicente do Rêgo Monteiro, who hosted him in Paris and introduced him to modernist art. The creation of the Centro Regionalista do Nordeste (Northeast Regionalist Center), the Regionalist Congress of 1926, and his collaborations in newspapers and magazines fighting modernism, as it was proposed by the paulistas, presents aesthetic principles and proposals that, if not rejecting the modern form, subordinated its use to regional and traditional themes and contents. As one of the losers of 1930, since Gilberto Freyre was chief of staff of Estácio Coimbra, president of the state of Pernambuco, who had sided with the candidacy of Júlio Prestes, the officialism candidate for the presidency of the Republic, beaten by the civil and military coup headed by Getúlio Vargas, he will live a paradoxical situation in the thirties. This is because while his pioneering book – largely written in his exile in Portugal, where he was taken for his loyalty to the deposed president of Pernambuco – raises him to the post of a great name in the country's intelligentsia. At the same time, he is seen with distrust and is persecuted by those who represent the regime, notably at the local level, where he became a public opposer and a constant critic of the intervener Agamemnon Magalhães and his modernization policies. His cultural militancy, in the thirties, remains consistent with his regionalist view of the nation. Gilberto Freyre, instead of wanting to undress the Harlequin, to overcome what Mário de Andrade considered to be the fragmented and torn body of the nation, sought to dress it with the diversity of colors that, for him, constituted the true face of the country. He did not consider the regionalism he defended incompatible with the idea of nation and always tried to affirm that his regionalism was limited to the cultural level, with no separatist intentions in the political sphere. Representing an elite that sees in the regional, in the construction of the idea of the Northeast region, a way of confronting the national domination of the elites of the Center-South, notably of São Paulo, Gilberto Freyre seems to realize that the cultural field is the only one not yet completely hegemonized by São Paulo, the only one in which the Northeastern intellectual elites, where those men of letters who had cultural capital, within an elite in economic and political decline, could still dispute the hegemony in national terms.12 The image of the nation would result from this very process of resistance by the regional cultural and intellectual elites to the São Paulo modernist project. This project, although being also a regional project, pretended to be national, precisely in the quest to nationalize itself, to expand throughout the country, destroying what he called local singularities. 12 See Albuquerque Jr, Durval Muniz de. The invention of the brazilian Northeast. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2014. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 26 His first book, Casa Grande & Senzala, published in 1933, offers a narrative of the historical formation of the country, privileging racial diversity and, at the same time, what would be the harmonious coexistence and the mixture between the three matrix races of nationality, extending the notion of miscegenation to the cultural field. Not only from the point of view of the formation of its population, but from the cultural point of view, Brazil would be a country marked by the diversity and multiplicity of colors and formal matrices. Brazil could be connected only to a European and white aesthetic, which he believed the São Paulo modernism proposed. In 1934, the year after the release of his debut book, he organized the 1st Congress of Afro-Brazilian Studies 13 in the city of Recife with the support of the director of the National Museum, Roquette-Pinto, and of Ulysses Pernambucano, a pioneer in psychiatric studies in Recife. In the midst of a regime that counted on the participation of intellectuals who embraced eugenist theses for the improvement and whitening of the national race, such as Oliveira Vianna and Cassiano Ricardo, who would increasingly show sympathy for the Nazi-fascist regimes with their official racist policies, Freyre’s initiative, in the sense of affirming the importance of the contribution of Africans and their descendants to Brazilian history and culture, puts him in the opposite direction of the regime’s expectations, which contributes to his version of modernism being forgotten. By publishing the book Nordeste in 1937, in addition to consolidating the imagetic-discursive elaboration of this regional identity, he will reaffirm, in the same year the state flags were burned, the importance of regional studies and of the regions to understand the history of the country. Furthermore, he will once again place the northeastern space and its sugar-producing elites, as he had done in his pioneering book, at the origins of nationality itself, while at the same time holding them responsible for many of the ecological and environmental problems experienced by the region, which would be one of the reasons for its decline. The book seems to reaffirm the harlequinal character of the nation, if we take the category adopted by Mário de Andrade to define the country, understanding it as the sum of its regions, the amalgamation of its regional particularities. Representative of a defeated and subordinated elite in the process of constitution of the independent, modern, and republican nation, Gilberto Freyre opposes the homogeneous image of the nation formulated by the winners in the economic and political arena who were headed, if there was no resistance, towards dominance in the intellectual field, especially when the creation of universities increasingly centralized intellectual production in the Center-South. Soon he would have to face competition and fierce opposition from the São Paulo school of sociology and from historians linked to the University of São Paulo. Having chosen to remain outside the University, he will find it increasingly difficult to make himself heard when it comes to academic production in the 13 See Freyre, Gilberto (ed.). Estudos Afro-Brasileiros: trabalhos apresentados ao 1º Congresso AfroBrasileiro, Recife, 1934. Rio de Janeiro, Ariel, 1935 (2 volumes). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque Júnior 27 country, although he enjoys enormous prestige abroad where his reading of the country's history forms generations of scholars. The nation, for Freyre, contrary to what Mário de Andrade thought, and unlike what Câmara Cascudo and Joaquim Inojosa espoused, was constituted by its different regional realities, which should be preserved in their authenticity and singularity, serving as a starting point for the elaboration of a national culture marked by diversity and polychromy. It is not a mere coincidence that when he brought together his articles on literary and artistic criticism, in which he presented what would be his guidelines for the production of a traditionalist and regionalist art – since for him the region was anchored in the past and represented a reserve of tradition – , he named the anthology Vida, forma e cor (Life, form and color). He always criticized the São Paulo modernism using formal arguments in which the issue of local colors and the reflection of regional life stands out. We can say that he launches chromatic arguments against modernism, as he considers that modernists are unaware of local colors, the colors and shapes from the colonial past. Thus, they let themselves be enchanted by the gray and brown of the cities, of the modern artifacts. The question was not, therefore, just about being or not being harlequinal, dressing or undressing the Harlequin, but also the colors that would dye the lozenges of his clothing. If Mário de Andrade seems to dream of khaki lozenges, of a Harlequin stripped of his colorful and torn clothes, to wear a monochromatic and one-piece outfit, Gilberto Freyre wants to dress the Harlequin in colonial colors, with reds, yellows, greens, pinks and blues of the landscapes and buildings belonging to the colonial past, at the time of splendor and glory of the Pernambuco slave elite, from which he was a descendant and whose dominion and nobility he seemed to miss. WORKS CITED Albuquerque Jr., Durval Muniz de. A feira dos mitos: a fabricação do folclore e/ou da cultura popular (Nordeste, 1920-1950). São Paulo, Intermeios, 2013. Albuquerque Jr., Durval Muniz de. The invention of the brazilian Northeast. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2014. Andrade, Mário de. Pauliceia Desvairada. São Paulo, Casa Mayensa, 1922. Andrade, Mário de. O Losango Cáqui. São Paulo, A. Tisi, 1926. Andrade, Mário de. Macunaíma: o herói sem nenhum caráter. São Paulo, Oficinas Gráficas de Eugênio Cupolo, 1928. Andrade, Mário de. O movimento modernista. In: Mário de Andrade. Aspectos da literatura brasileira. 6 ed. São Paulo, Livraria Martins Editora S.A, 1978, p. 231-255. Andrade, Mário de. O turista aprendiz. Brasília, IPHAN, 2015. ANDRADE, Mário de. Missão de pesquisas folclóricas: música tradicional do Norte e Nordeste. São Paulo, SESC-SP, 2006. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Albuquerque 28 Amaral, Aracy e Barros, Regina Teixeira. Moderno onde? Moderno quando? A Semana de 22 como motivação. São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2021. Cascudo, Luís da Câmara. Vaqueiros e cantadores: folclore poético dos sertões de Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte e Ceará. Porto Alegre, Globo, 1939. Chauí, Marilena. O nacional e o popular na cultura brasileira: seminários. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1984. Freyre, Gilberto. Casa-Grande & Senzala, Rio de Janeiro, José Olympio, 1933. Freyre, Gilberto (org.). Estudos Afro-Brasileiros: trabalhos apresentados ao 1º Congresso Afro-Brasileiro, Recife, 1934. Rio de Janeiro, Ariel, 1935 (2 volumes). Freyre, Gilberto et alii. Livro do Nordeste. Recife, Secretaria da Justiça/Arquivo Público Estadual, 1979. (Edição fac-similada) Freyre, Gilberto. Nordeste: aspectos da influência da cana sobre a vida e a paisagem do Nordeste do Brasil. Recife, Fundação do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico de Pernambuco, 1985. Freyre, Gilberto. Vida, forma e cor. São Paulo, Record, 1987. Inojosa, Joaquim. O movimento modernista em Pernambuco, 1º volume. Rio de Janeiro, Gráfica Tupy, 1968. Inojosa, Joaquim. A arte moderna. Rio de Janeiro, Cátedra, 1984. Oliveira, Giuseppe Roncalli Ponce Leon. Correspondência de Luís da Câmara Cascudo: arquivos da criação e redes de sociabilidade intelectual. São Paulo, Universidade de São Paulo, 2016 (Tese de Doutorado em História) Sales Neto, Francisco Firmino. Palavras que silenciam, Câmara Cascudo e o regionalismotradicionalista nordestino. João Pessoa, Ed. da UFPB, 2008. Tércio, Jason. Em busca da alma brasileira: biografia de Mário de Andrade. São Paulo, Estação Brasil, 2019. QUOTE AS: Durval Muniz Albuquerque Júnior. Dressing or undressing the Harlequin? Modernisms, regional disputes, and images of the nation in Brazil. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 13-28 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 29 REVISITING OSWALD DE ANDRADE’S ‘TECHNICIZED BARBARIAN’ by RODRIGO CARDOSO In his Manifesto Antropófago, published in 1928 in the literary journal Revista de Antropofagia, Oswald de Andrade wrote: “Affiliation. Contact with the Caraíba Brazil. Où Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. The natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Surrealist Revolution and Keyserling's technicized barbarian. We walk.” 1. In the Manifesto, the “clothed civilization” brought to the Americas by the Portuguese, all “catechizations”, and even grammar and logic are construed as the opposite of anthropophagy, which would be instinctive, matriarchal, in contact with the soil, a form of subsistence and knowledge in the relation between the self and the cosmos. In that context, the technicized barbarian is pointed out as a future ideal, the result of the successive revolutions humanity has undergone. He is idealized, therefore, as the new man that these revolutions foreshadow, and characterized by the enjoyment of the benefits of the technology produced by modern civilization, but without the catechism and 1 Revista de Antropofagia, Year One, n. 1, p. 3. All Portuguese quotes translated by me. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 30 Christian morals that underlie it. The refusal of Western morality, then, would imply a “return to the natural state” associated, in turn, with the pre-Cabralian Tupinambá. It is interesting to note, however, that the “technicized barbarian” proposed by Oswald is a subversion of the one proposed by the Lithuanian-German philosopher Hermann Keyserling, for whom the term indicated the loss of spirit and the moral decay of modern man, who had allegedly become a mere automaton in his dependence on machines2. After the Manifesto Antropófago, Oswald develops his anthropophagic utopia and the notion of “technicized barbarian” more systematically in an essay written in 1950, “A crise da filosofia messiânica” (or “The crisis of messianic philosophy”). The inclusion of a reflection on Marx and Marxism, related to Andrade’s approximation to the Communist Party during the 1930s, introduce in this essay a critique of work both in capitalist society and in Soviet society. After a philosophical and historical overview of Western civilization, Andrade presents a summary of his theses and a prognosis which can be described as both programmatic and utopian. He foresees the dialectical overcoming of the current Patriarchy, with its messianic philosophy, by a renewed Matriarchy based on an anthropophagic philosophy and expressed in the figure of the technical natural man or the ‘technicized barbarian’. This new matriarchy would be characterized by, "children of maternal right, common ownership of the soil and the State without classes, or the absence of the State"3, unquote, in a clear dialogue with communist utopias. In addition to the extinction of private property by what he calls "Matriarchy" 4, one of the central themes of "A crise da filosofia messiânica" is idleness. In the text, the author offers a See Daniel Faria, “As meditações americanas de Keyserling: um cosmopolitismo nas incertezas do tempo”, Varia Historia 29, no 51 (dezembro de 2013): 905–23, https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-87752013000300013. 2 3 Oswald de Andrade, A utopia antropofágica, org. Gênese Andrade (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2011), 204. As to the meaning of "Matriarchy" in Oswald de Andrade, the posthumous essay "The anthropaphagous” makes it clear that it does not refer to a socio-political order in which women have power over men, but rather one in which polygamy and institutions such as avunculate, uxorilocality and matrilinearity predominate – which, in any case, could already be inferred by carefully reading his other texts. For criticism of Andrade’s misleading use of the term matriarchy, see Beth Joan Vinkler, “The Anthropophagic Mother/Other: Appropriated Identities in Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’”, Luso-Brazilian Review 34, no 1 (1997): 105–11; Ana Paula M Morel, “Entre a antropologia e a literatura: a antropofagia de Oswald de Andrade”, Revista de Ciências Sociais, Fortaleza 44, no 2 (dezembro de 2013): 95–110. 4 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 31 fictitious etymology for the words ‘sacerdócio’ (priesthood), defining the priest as one who sacralizes and claims for himself the right to a sacred idleness (‘ócio’), and ‘negócio’ (business), is described as the negation of idleness and the central principle of capitalist society. Andrade then defines idleness as the main value denied by messianic philosophy and, simultaneously, as a central value to his utopian project. He writes: All social techniques, legislation as well as politics, utility [ofemilidade] as well as unfortunistics [infortunística], reduce work, organize it, and compensate on sanitary and palinodic bases. It is the sharing of idleness to which every man born of a woman is entitled. And the common ideal becomes retirement, which is the metaphysics of idleness. In the supertechnical world that is announced, when the final barriers of the Patriarchy fall, man can feed his innate laziness, the mother of fantasy, invention, and love. And restore himself, after the end of his long state of negativity, in the synthesis at last, of the technique that is civilization and of the natural life that is culture, his playful instinct. Over Faber, Viator and Sapiens, Homo Ludens will prevail. Serenely waiting for the devouring of the planet by the imperative of its cosmic destiny.5 After the serendipitously optimistic program of waiting for the world's end while relying on the work of robots, in his final theses, Andrade argues that "the current phase of human progress foreshadows what Aristotle sought to express by saying that when the spindles worked alone, the slave would disappear" 6. Implicit in Andrade’s defense of idleness is the criticism of productivist dogmatism and the centrality of work as a social principle and essence of man. Similarly to Paul Lafargue, in The right to be lazy, Andrade defines idleness as a fundamental human right that should be seen as a driving force for the political and revolutionary imagination. As a utopian demand, 5 Andrade, A utopia antropofágica, 145. 6 Andrade, 204. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 32 the defense of idleness makes up a critique of the ideological ethics of work in both capitalism and Soviet socialism and allows us to glimpse new fields of concrete political claim and struggle against the capitalist State’s mechanisms of control.7 However, Oswald de Andrade rejects class struggle as a fundamental category of politics and projects his utopian claim into a metahistorical plan naturally accomplished in a dialectical teleology of progress based on the faith in technological development. Anthropophagy is often and productively read as a kind of anti-metaphysical philosophy or meta-critical category of Brazilian literary and artistic history. However, if we consider the original context of the Revista de Antropofagia in the late 1920s, it becomes evident that it plays an important role in the building of discourses about national identity that were being developed by many intellectuals then. In her book, Cannibal Democracy, Professor Zita Nunes has pointed out how the assimilation of the indigenous as a symbol by a white intellectual elite connects anthropophagy with the ideology of Racial Democracy. In the text of anthropophagy, while black people are repressed and erased, the indigenous is always depicted as a pre-Cabralian ideal and thus confined to the past. Indigenous traits valued in relation to anthropophagy are then claimed by those white, Portuguese-speaking intellectuals in the economic capital of Brazilian developmentalism. While Gilberto Freyre’s, narrative of Racial Democracy mythically enacts the projection of male European desire over native and black female bodies in the formation of the “Brasil Moreno”, as Denise Ferreira da Silva describes,8 in anthropophagy the white Paulista artist becomes the indigenous themselves who has devoured and continues to devour European subjectivity in a synchronous and everpresent process of absorption of transparency 9. 7 See Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). See Chapter 10 – Tropical Democracy in Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 8 This argument is more thoroughly developed in my dissertation. See Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso, “Políticas do primitivismo na América Latina: raça, nação e utopia na Revista de Antropofagia e em Amauta” (Campinas, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2021), http://www.repositorio.unicamp.br/acervo/detalhe/1231115. 9 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 33 So, how can we understand the effectivity of the image of the “technical natural man” or the “technicized barbarian” in the context of highly racialized discourses during the period of hegemonization of the myth of racial democracy in Brazil? Or, as Abdias Nascimento calls it, the ideology of Brazilian racism10? The first issue one can raise is the recurring association of laziness and indigenous peoples in anthropophagy: “lazy people in the world map of Brazil”, reads the Manifesto 11. Of course, as we can read in Oswald de Andrade’s 1950 essay, idleness and laziness are seen as positive and desired values in his anthropophagic utopia, when machines will do all the work and people can dedicate themselves to “fantasy, invention and love”. In Stone Age Economics, Marshal Sahlins criticizes the classical notion that non-capitalist societies live in scarcity economies. Through the analysis of many ethnographies of hunter/gatherer peoples, Sahlins argues these are, in fact, affluent societies with very few hours dedicated to work and the procurement of delicacies rather than simple nourishment. The rest of their time is dedicated to leisure, gossip, and social and religious activities. In that sense, anthropophagic utopian idleness could be read as a critique of the capitalist ideology of work ethics and a claim for less work hours in a more humane lifestyle. The “Anthropophagous Manifesto” reads: “we had communism. [...] We had the relation and distribution of physical goods, moral goods, dignified goods.”12 At the same time, while celebrating indigenous “laziness”, anthropophagy also claims all the technological advances of industrial modernity. The manifesto reads: “American cinema will inform. [...] towards the technicized barbarian of Keyserling. We walk. [...] The fixation of progress through catalogs and television sets. Machinery only. And blood transfusers”13. In the 2nd dentition, Jurandyr Manfredini writes: “we should not confuse the return to the natural state (what we 10 Abdias Nascimento, O genocídio do negro brasileiro: processo de um racismo mascarado (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva S.A, 2016). 11 Revista de Antropofagia, Year One, n. 1, p. 3. 12 Revista de Antropofagia, Year One, n. 1, p. 3. 13 Revista de Antropofagia, Year One, n. 1, p. 3. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 34 want) with the return to the primitive state (which we don't care about)” 14 . In general, Anthropophagy rejects the indigenous way of life as a social model, and values only a vague notion of simplicity materialized, eventually, in the idea of idleness as the unlimited possibility of pleasure and creativity. Moreover, the association of laziness to indigenous peoples is one of the main tropes of the racist discourse of colonialism worldwide and has justified the enslavement, genocide and assimilation of indigenous peoples throughout history, as this alleged laziness is seen as an essential characteristic of indigenous peoples and incompatible with the modern project and its disciplinary axioms. Since the beginning of colonization and the first Portuguese invasion, Brazil has been constituted and structured through racialized slavery. In Negros da terra, John Manuel Monteiro reconstitutes the history of enslavement of the indigenous peoples that characterized the first Portuguese settlements in Brazil and the bandeirantismo of the first centuries of colonization. While there are reports, in the first encounters, of a few attempts at collaboration and cooperation between the Portuguese and indigenous peoples, soon the mercantile appetites of the Europeans exceeded their saturation point. "To the displeasure of the colonizers [....] the Indians provided provisions only sporadically and in a limited way, while the Portuguese began to depend increasingly on indigenous production and labor for their own livelihood" 15. In the period that followed, the Portuguese began to resort more and more to force and violence to coerce indigenous people to work for their benefit. Faced with the impossibility of simply conquering a much larger population, war between indigenous peoples began to be used and fomented to subject groups that resisted, and to enslave them. Faced with the Church's debates about the existence of a soul in indigenous peoples and the need to catechize them, Portuguese legislation in the Philippine Ordinations began to limit indigenous slavery, 14 Revista de Antropofagia, Year Two (2ª dentição), n. 4 15 John M. Monteiro, Negros da terra: índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1994), 32. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 35 admitting it only in cases of "Just Wars" or in the capture of already enslaved people. Despite this, the number of "entradas e bandeiras", expeditions with the main purpose of capturing indigenous labor, increased, manipulating the terms for lawful enslavement without any kind of regulation. According to Darcy Ribeiro, "strictly speaking, despite the copious legislation guaranteeing the freedom of the Indians, it can be affirmed that the only indispensable requirement for the Indian to be enslaved was to still be a free Indian" 16. Meanwhile, Jesuit reductions aimed at indigenous evangelization used their workforce to maintain and enrich the Church's Estate, leasing their work when it was convenient, making indigenous labor an essential element in the building of colonial Brazil. While the lucrative Atlantic trade of enslaved Africans soon replaced indigenous labor as the main source of profit for the colonizers, indigenous labor continued to be used until the 18th century for the subsistence economy, necessary but devalued within the mercantile export system17. This change was accompanied by discourses that attributed to indigenous people predicates of savagery, inconstancy, and refusal to work and made the African labor more attractive, according also to the interests of the lucrative slave trade 18. In his study of the "myth of the lazy native", Syad Hussein Alatas demonstrates the recurrence of accusations against southeast Asian natives, particularly Malays, as one of colonial capitalism’s main domination strategies in the nineteenth century. Analyzing texts from colonial administrators, travelers and academics linked to the colonial enterprise, Alatas observes the explicit recognition of the diligence and work ability of the natives for jobs that served their livelihood within local economic practices. However, this work was not valued and was despised by the writers of modernity in the region. Thus, the native's image fashioned 16 Darcy Ribeiro, O povo brasileiro: a formação e o sentido do Brasil, Estudos de antropologia da civilização (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1995), 99. 17 Ribeiro, O povo brasileiro. See Giuseppe Marcocci, “Escravos ameríndios e negros africanos: uma história conectada. Teorias e modelos de discriminação no império português (ca. 1450-1650)”, Tempo 16, no 30 (2011): 41–70; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “O mármore e a murta: sobre a inconstância da alma selvagem”, Revista de antropologia, 1992, 21–74. 18 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 36 by these writers had an important role in the exploitation of these peoples by colonial capitalism. As Alatas argues, The image of the native had a function in the exploitation complex of colonial times. This was the time when the capitalist conception of labour gained supremacy. Any type of labour which did not conform to this conception was rejected as a deviation. A community which did not enthusiastically and willingly adopt this conception of labour was regarded as indolent. 19 Only work focused on colonial production, and which became direct profit for the colonizers – export monoculture in the plantations – was valued and considered worthy. Because of this, imported forced labor employed in this production, although also characterized with many racist predicates, were considered fit and capable workers. On the other hand, native workers, resistant to exploitation in plantations on their own lands, which presented no rewards for local communities, have for centuries become the targets of accusations of indolence and laziness. These discourses eventually constituted an ideology so enduring that they became a common trope used even by Malay native intellectuals during the processes of independence in the second half of the twentieth century. Alatas also discusses the role of some intellectuals who are generally critical of imperialism and the exploitation of work, but who also reproduce the colonial ideology's depiction of the native, as in the cases of the Filipino nationalist writer José Rizal, English historian John Hobson and even Marx and Engels 20 . While denouncing the exploitative and violent character of imperialism as immoral, these authors reproduced stereotypes and prejudiced 19 Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (Londres: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1977), 70. “Marx and Engels. Their condescending attitude, their carelessness about facts, their misinterpretation of Asian institutions, and their ethnic pride, were clearly revealed in their writings. Marx called Chinese isolation barbarous, ignoring the fact that in such isolation China had built a grand civilization. In the apprehension of great changes Orientals used to hoard. His view of the Indian peasant and village life excelled that of the British Colonial administrator in its distortion and insulting tone. The destruction of the village community, which he considered to be semi-civilized, was hailed by him as the 'only social revolution ever heard of in Asia'”. Alatas, 232. 20 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 37 images about colonized peoples and contributed to the propagation of ideas and arguments that ultimately served to justify the colonization and the dominance of native populations by the white-European yoke. Similarly, the characterization of the Brazilian indigenous as lazy works as part of a colonial ideology within the slave economy that favored the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and their commercialization as commodities. The fact stands that the myth of the lazy Indian has become a commonplace of Brazilian culture, repeated to this day as part of the racist discourse against indigenous people in the country 21 . This must be taken into account when we attempt to evaluate the effect of anthropophagy’s statements idealizing indigenous peoples in a utopian image of idleness and refusal to work. The trope of “indigenous laziness” remains one of the main arguments that demarcate the incompatibility of indigenous communities with the productivist and developmental paradigm that guides the nation-state within global capitalist modernity, excluding indigenous people from the nation's communal imagination and making them targets of genocidal practices and policies. In that sense, the racist stereotyping disseminated by this discourse submits indigenous people to racist offenses, attacks on their territorial rights, ethnocide through practices of evangelization, assimilation and even the kidnapping of babies by the State under the argument that families are not able to provide for their children 22, in addition to physical aggression and massacres. With that in mind, one must consider the association between the Indian and idleness found in anthropophagy as part of the colonial and racist ideological-discursive complex. The fact In 2018, the then vice-presidential candidate, Hamilton Mourão, stated that “Brazil inherited the indolence of the Indians”: https://congressoemfoco.uol.com.br/area/pais/mourao-diz-que-pais-herdou-indolencia-doindio-e-malandragem-do-negro/. Accessed in May 2022. In 2019, Pará State Attorney Ricardo Albuquerque da Silva stated that “The problem of slavery in Brazil happened because the Indian does not like to work, until today. The Indian would rather die than dig a mine or to work the land for the Portuguese”: https://congressoemfoco.uol.com.br/direitos-humanos/negro-foi-escravizado-porque-indio-e-preguicoso-dizprocurador-deputados-repudiam/ Accessed in May 2022. For a more complete assessment of racism against indigenous people in Brazil see Felipe Milanez et al., “Existência e diferença: o racismo contra os povos indígenas / Existence and difference: racism against indigenous peoples”, Revista Direito e Práxis 10, no 3 (Sep. 2019): 2161–81. 21 22 See https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/in-brazil-indigenous-people-fighting-to-keepchildren. Accessed in May 2022. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 38 becomes more evident when considering its locus of enunciation: a white urban bourgeoisie with no engagement with the situation of the indigenous peoples of Brazil except for occasional praise for the assimilationist project of the SPI (Indian Protection Service).23 Even so, to understand the effectiveness of anthropophagy's and Oswald de Andrade's politics, it is necessary to consider how this discourse is mobilized within a utopian project of criticism of the organization of capitalist labor and modern productivism. In this sense, the anthropophagic praise of laziness and idleness also corresponds to a perception that indigenous people live a rich and abundant way of life that, which, at the same time, rejects the logic of capitalist accumulation and overproduction. However, while the utopic representation of anthropophagy points to alternative values in its critique of capitalism, it reinforces racist discourses in its abstraction of concrete indigenous bodies. But, perhaps, the most difficult and delicate issue here, rather than utopian idleness, is the means used to reach that goal in a “supertechnicized world that announces itself” 24. The ideal of the “technicized barbarian” is based on the notion of the liberation of work by technology, which allows us to conceive of a world in which human beings enjoy the freedom conquered by the overcoming of the capitalist State and "wage slavery" having all their fundamental needs, and even the whims of modern life, met by the automatic work of machines. In this scenario, the machines would perform the necessary work in all stages of production: the extraction of minerals and vegetables from the soil, the control and slaughter of animals, the assembly and synthesis of products, quality control, and even the work required for developing and reproducing new machines. If this description may already suggest some nightmarish dystopian images, we don’t have to go so far in order to find some delicate issues in a utopian formulation based on technological development and the liberation from work through machines. The Oswaldian imagination conceives the liberation of work for idleness as a virtuality contained in the present ("the current phase of human progress foreshadows what Aristotle sought to express by saying that, when if spindles worked alone, the slave 23 Oswald de Andrade, Estética e política, org. Maria Eugenia Boaventura (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2011), 197. See also Rodrigo Cardoso, “Colonialidade, transculturação e identidade nacional na antropofagia modernista”, Entre caníbales, Lima 2, no 9 (2018). 24 Andrade, A utopia antropofágica, 145. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 39 would disappear”25). This imagination is projected from an increasingly technological world, which is, however, still fundamentally structured by globality and the racial division of labor. The thesis that the technological development of machinery could mean the end of capitalist exploitation is put forward by Marx himself in his economic manuscripts and has been taken up by countless Marxist theorists ever since. Nevertheless, while indicating this possibility, Marx demonstrates how capitalism converts any labor freed up by the purchase of machinery into further exploitation destined for capitalist accumulation. In the famous fragment about machinery in the Grundrisse 26 , Marx points out the eventual tendency of technological development to free up the labor time of the worker, potentially reducing exploitation and allowing him to devote the earned time to developing his own capabilities. Here, machinery is considered a means of production or a form of fixed capital. However, the tendency of capital is to create superfluous needs in order to continue exploiting the worker's time in the production of exchange and surplus value for capital accumulation, by producing, for example, more machinery to be appropriated as fixed capital. Capitalism lives on its own incessant expansion. The acquisition of machinery favors overproduction, which must be disposed of through increased consumption. Here lies the connection between technological development in capitalism with imperialist expansion, made explicit by Paul Lafargue. 27 For the capitalist, it is necessary to continue to produce more and more, and so the worker is redirected to another function so as to remain trapped within the cycle of production and consumption. This ever-expanding cycle leads to an unceasing escalation of production, as Deleuze & Guattari note, bringing the capitalist economy closer to full output within the given limits, and by widening these limits in turn-especially within an order of military expenditures that are in no way competitive with private enterprise, quite the contrary […] The State, its police, and its army form a gigantic enterprise of 25 Andrade, 204. My emphasis. 26 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 2005. 690-712 27 Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, 2022. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 40 antiproduction, but at the heart of production itself, and conditioning this production.28 And thus, technological development is incapable of bringing benefits to the worker by itself unless the worker forcibly appropriates the freed-up time. While the surplus value is reinvested in the acquisition of more machinery, the worker finds himself increasingly alienated from the result of his work and reduced to a surplus piece of machinery, as the machinery reduced the number of workers necessary for production. The liberation of work and the end of capitalist exploitation cannot be a natural consequence of technological progress. The very concept of progress based on the technical-scientific development of the means of production constitutes a mode of bourgeois ideology that minimizes the central and necessary role of the worker in the production process, who increasingly resembles the machine himself, as one more mechanism in the production process. It is also interesting to note the parallels between Marx's description of the role played by machinery in industrial capitalism and the racial division of labor characteristic of colonial capitalism. The modern text, contemporary with primitive accumulation and the colonial exploitation of the Americas and slave labor, established racial difference as an expression of the duality of body and mind, or, similarly, of the primitive and the modern 29 . This separation was also implicit in modern disciplinary technologies developed as submission of body to mind. The modern text identifies Africans and indigenous peoples, in their alleged primitivism, with animality and, similarly, according to Cartesian dualism, as automatons or machines. Thus, modern racial division of labor links them to an eternal and insurmountable primitive accumulation, subjecting them, through total violence, forced evictions and 28 Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trad. Helen R Lane, Robert Hurley, e Mark Seem (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 235. See Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina” (clacso Buenos Aires, 2000); Silvia Frederici, Calibã e a bruxa: mulheres, corpo e acumulação primitiva, trad. coletivo Sycorax (São Paulo: Elefante, 2017). 29 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 41 physical coercion, to reiterated extractions of total value, while “only” surplus value is extracted from white workers, as Ferreira da Silva argues 30. As several historians and colonial chroniclers record 31, in Brazilian slave society, every form of heavy or productive labor was carried out by enslaved people: planting and harvesting on plantations, extracting precious ores from the soil, production of food for the subsistence of the colonial population, the transport of heavy loads, the reproduction of domestic life. Work was seen as an unworthy occupation for whites and especially for the elite, who lived a life of idleness, dedicated to social, intellectual and administrative activities. Enslaved indigenous and African people were treated, from a legal and social point of view, as objects or goods. Their bodies were the private property of the white masters. In seeking to understand the economic transformations that led to the end of slavery and the adoption of wage labor by capitalists, Marxist thinkers historically characterized the slave as a form of fixed capital that did not meet the expanding consumption needs of industrial capital 32 . Reflecting on the relationship between the institution of slavery and liberal ideology, Roberto Schwarz, for example, writes: “Being property, a slave can be sold, but not fired. The free worker, at this point, gives his employer more freedom, in addition to immobilizing less capital.” 33 Thus, the enslaved body, as fixed capital, occupies, for colonial capitalism, a structural place similar to that of machinery in industrial capitalism, in the terms of political economy. In the scheme of racial division of labor that characterizes modernity/coloniality and conceives of non-white bodies as work machines, the slave-owning patriarchal society appears as the black and white mirror of a utopia where “[the white] man can feed his innate 30 Denise Ferreira da Silva, A dívida Impagável, trad. Pedro Daher e Amilcar Packer (São Paulo: Oficina de Imaginação Política e Living Commons, 2019). 31 See Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Nem preto, nem branco, muito pelo contrário: cor e raça na sociabilidade brasileira, Coleção Agenda brasileira (São Paulo, SP: Claro Enigma, 2012). See Ricardo Rezende Figueira, “Por que o trabalho escravo?”, Estudos Avançados 14 (abril de 2000): 31– 50, https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-40142000000100003. 32 33 Roberto Schwarz, Cultura e política (São Paulo, SP: Paz e Terra, 2009), 63. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 42 laziness, mother of fantasy, invention and love. And restore himself at last, after the end of his long state of negativity, in the synthesis of technique that is civilization and of the natural life that is culture, his playful instinct” 34. At this point, it's not untimely to remember that Oswald de Andrade's family, when migrating from Pará and Minas Gerais to São Paulo at the end of the 19th century, made their fortune by leasing fixed capital: renting slaves 35. In this world on the other side of the mirror, while the white man can feed his innate laziness, black people work as machinery, the means of production that has liberated workers to enjoy their natural right to laziness. In any case, Oswald de Andrade's utopian proposition evidently does not prescribe the racial division of labor and the conversion of black and indigenous bodies into machines so that “the spindles work by themselves”. The author most certainly had such an absolute technological development in mind that really all men would be freed from manual labor. But, even if we followed this logic, the question would still remain for the anthropophagic imagination to answer: who will build the machinery that will finally free mankind from all work? Who must extract metal from the ground to build it? Who operates said machinery until it is able to do it by itself? What has allowed Oswald de Andrade to imagine the advent of the “technicized barbarian” in 1928 and 1950? Does the erasure of black people and contemporary indigenous peoples in the text of anthropophagy symbolically equate their inscription as fixed capital? Given the contemporary reality of spatial segregation and total extraction of value from racialized bodies, it is necessary to question, once again, in what ways the ideology of progress and the fetishization of technical and scientific development corroborate the reintegration of decoded flows of capital into the structures of coloniality that organize global capitalism. While it is incorporated into the worker-machine system of the technological industrial complex, the incessant escalation of overproduction is drained through the necropolitical militarization of spaces of colonial occupation demarcated by raciality. In this 34 Andrade, A utopia antropofágica, 145. 35 See Oswald de Andrade, Um homem sem profissão: sob as ordens de mamãe (Editora Globo, 1990). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 43 scenario, the praise of the machine without the question of whom does it work for, and under what conditions, leaves the question whether the technicized barbarian concretized as a political entity could be a Palestinian militant with his sling or bazooka, a Maoist guerrilla fighting for national liberation with an AK-47, or, rather, an Uribista Robocop repressing demonstrations in Colombia, a CORE police officer with all his equipment invading the favela in the last Chacina do Jacarezinho or even the venture capitalist who diversifies his investments by buying shares in the arms industry on his cell phone while sunbathing on the deck of a yacht sailing on international waters. WORKS CITED Alatas, Syed Hussein. The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism. Londres: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1977. Andrade, Oswald de. A utopia antropofágica. Organizado por Gênese Andrade. São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2011. Andrade, Oswald de. Estética e política. Organizado por Maria Eugenia Boaventura. São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2011. Andrade, Oswald de. Um homem sem profissão: sob as ordens de mamãe. Editora Globo, 1990. Cardoso, Rodrigo. “Colonialidade, transculturação e identidade nacional na antropofagia modernista”. Entre caníbales, Lima 2, no 9 (2018). Cardoso, Rodrigo Octávio. “Políticas do primitivismo na América Latina: raça, nação e utopia na Revista de Antropofagia e em Amauta”. Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2021. http://www.repositorio.unicamp.br/acervo/detalhe/1231115. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 44 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de. “O mármore e a murta: sobre a inconstância da alma selvagem”. Revista de antropologia, 1992, 21–74. Deleuze, Gilles, e Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Traduzido por Helen R Lane, Robert Hurley, e Mark Seem. New York: Penguin Books, 2009. Faria, Daniel. “As meditações americanas de Keyserling: um cosmopolitismo nas incertezas do tempo”. Varia Historia 29, no 51 (dezembro de 2013): 905–23. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-87752013000300013. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. A dívida Impagável. Traduzido por Pedro Daher e Amilcar Packer. São Paulo: Oficina de Imaginação Política e Living Commons, 2019. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Figueira, Ricardo Rezende. “Por que o trabalho escravo?” Estudos Avançados 14 (abril de 2000): 31–50. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-40142000000100003. Frederici, Silvia. Calibã e a bruxa: mulheres, corpo e acumulação primitiva. Traduzido por coletivo Sycorax. São Paulo: Elefante, 2017. Lafargue, Paul. The Right to Be Lazy, 2022. Marcocci, Giuseppe. “Escravos ameríndios e negros africanos: uma história conectada. Teorias e modelos de discriminação no império português (ca. 1450-1650)”. Tempo 16, no 30 (2011): 41–70. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 2005. Milanez, Felipe, Lucia Sá, Ailton Krenak, Felipe Sotto Maior Cruz, Elisa Urbano Ramos, e Genilson dos Santos de Jesus. “Existência e diferença: o racismo contra os povos indígenas The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 45 / Existence and difference: racism against indigenous peoples”. Revista Direito e Práxis 10, no 3 (1o de setembro de 2019): 2161–81. Monteiro, John M. Negros da terra: índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1994. Morel, Ana Paula M. “Entre a antropologia e a literatura: a antropofagia de Oswald de Andrade”. Revista de Ciências Sociais, Fortaleza 44, no 2 (dezembro de 2013): 95–110. Nascimento, Abdias. O genocídio do negro brasileiro: processo de um racismo mascarado. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva S.A, 2016. Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina”. Clacso Buenos Aires, 2000. Ribeiro, Darcy. O povo brasileiro: a formação e o sentido do Brasil. Estudos de antropologia da civilização. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1995. Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz. Nem preto, nem branco, muito pelo contrário: cor e raça na sociabilidade brasileira. Coleção Agenda brasileira. São Paulo, SP: Claro Enigma, 2012. Schwarz, Roberto. Cultura e política. São Paulo, SP: Paz e Terra, 2009. Vinkler, Beth Joan. “The Anthropophagic Mother/Other: Appropriated Identities in Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’”. Luso-Brazilian Review 34, no 1 (1997): 105–11. Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Cardoso 46 QUOTE AS: Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso. Revisiting Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Technicized Barbarian’. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 29-46 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 47 MODERNITY IN CORNELIO PENNA by FLÁVIA VIEIRA When it comes to gender and sexuality, however, the historical avant-gardes were - and very much so - as patriarchal, misogynistic, and masculinist as the great currents of modernism. - Andreas Huyssen Whether in literature, philosophy, the arts, or politics, black discourse has been dominated by three events: slavery, colonization, and apartheid. They constitute a kind of prison in which, to this day, this discourse - Achille Mbembe The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 still struggles. Vieira 48 On the centennial of the Brazilian Week of Modern Art, 1922, celebrations were marked by empty virtual polemics and by a clear institutional disinterest. The lack of interest is partly due to the conflictual period through which we are living in Brazil, since 2016. The “white coup” suffered by president-elect Dilma Rousseff and the arbitrary and illegal arrest of former president Lula, who would have been the current president’s direct contender in the 2018 elections, reinforce the current political scenario, evidencing an effort to empty the debates about our history and our culture. The situation is thus marked by a strategy of permanent discrediting of the symbolic constellation which constitutes Brazilian identity. The coming to power of an extreme-right government, averse to the Arts and openly hostile towards culture, is the probable cause of the weakening of the historic event, despite it being widely considered a watershed in our conception of Culture: a significant aesthetic turnaround in the cultural representation of Brazil. It is, therefore, part of an effort of cultural and political resistance to critically reevaluate the Week of Modern Art — an event that (re)defined the aesthetic directions of Brazil — through an investigation of the components of our Cultural Identity. The 1922 Week of Modern Art’s cultural significance and historical unfolding, nevertheless, remain open. There are contradictions beneath the demolishing outbursts of its creators, which announced a clear rupture with the academic tradition. The carefully constructed image of unity of the historic event hides divergent currents and tentative The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 49 assertions. It is thus necessary to review aspects that form our cultural representation. This exercise is in part a way of understanding how we got here and the role of Modernity and Modernism in this unstoppable emptying that prevails today in Brazil. From a contemporary perspective, it is urgent to reassess the controversial elements, as well as the brutal composition of one among so many unfortunate pages of our history. I intend to emphasize how a prevailing model of modernity, under the broad notion of Modernism, reduced and concealed, within the paradigm of rupture vs. tradition, a wide range of dynamics in favor of a partial renovation. This refers to the identification of undercurrents of literary production that, even if historically accepted as “modernist”, were characterized by a more nuanced stance relative to the two antagonist positions within the literary production at the time of the 1922 Week of Modern Art. On one side, were those who defended the continuity of nineteenth century academic tradition, through the construction of an idealized country that enshrined within the Romantic ideals; on the other, the rupture inaugurated with Modernism, a declared break with the past, projecting Brazil into the panorama of aesthetic modernization after the European avant-gardes, seeking to build a new Brazilian identity. The current revisionist energy is part of a process of reparation, based on a critical look at a historic process which, concerned with determining the contours of a modern Brazilian Culture, would have itself contained stereotypes and generalizations reinforced within the movement. Contemporary critical re-examinations of the initial modernist events in Brazilian literary history aim to question, reassess, and review a moment of enthusiastic transformation and its ties to reductionist points of view. This process repositions the symbolic significance The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 50 of the 1922 Week of Modern Art and aims to reestablish the role of divergent, non-canonical and fringe contributions, forming a more complex and multilayered history. 1. A productive convergence of classes: Oswald and Mario (the Andrades) The 1922 Week of Modern Art was a confluence event; an attempt at synthesis of dispersed or not yet consolidated local vanguards. It sought to build a positive look at Brazilian culture and to represent it as an autonomous entity: an attempt to conflate individual efforts within the broad lines of European modernism, while adding overtones of “local color” through the search for native expressions. The effort also aimed at breaking with a nostalgic view of Romanticism and sought to establish a “true” aesthetic autonomy in Brazil. The symbolic and social significance of the Week of Modern Art was also bound by the cosmopolitan views of a Brazilian elite coming mainly from São Paulo, with strong ties to Europe. Its main figure and idealizer, the poet Oswald de Andrade, had begun a process of intellectual maturity years before, in 1911, having gone to Paris where he came in contact with European modern vanguards. Oswald had committed himself with urgency to a modernist aesthetic revision in Brazil. From the spirit of the Week of Modern Art, he will propose the Pau Brasil Manifesto (1924) and the Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928), the latter containing the “guidelines” for a “cannibalistic absorption” of European models within the Brazilian cultural matrix. The manifestos and the event set the tone for a first phase modern rupture: a recycling of sorts of the traditional Brazilian myths under the framework of Dada critical irony, among other avant-garde lines. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 51 Born in the city of São Paulo, the Movement inherits its provincial character and conforms itself to the network of interests of the cultural and economic elite of its state, despite a growing interest in the regional characteristics of Brazil. If there is a more radical multicultural immersion, mainly observed in Rio de Janeiro, of which Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928) is a major expression, this is still an exception within the generally idealized connections to the “undomesticated” rhythms of culture. In combating the Romantic and Parnassian aesthetic heritages, structural issues of Brazilian society remained alien to the movement, despite its impetus for renewal. The so-called heroic phase of the modern movement in Brazil, inaugurated in 1922, made little progress in the resolution of the contradictions of cultural representation. It was founded on theories that tended to neutralize the conflictive nature of the social structure, as was the case with the myth of “racial harmony” proposed by Gilberto Freyre, as observes Costa Lima. The attenuation of social contradictions seems to be a characteristic of Brazilian institutions. Even the nation’s most prominent historic ruptures, such as the Proclamation of Independence and the establishment of the Republic (1889), were not a true search for autonomy, having been built on asymmetric institutional arrangements, in which economic dependence on Portugal, and indirectly on England, remained a central element. We identify in this dynamic the forces that spoke on behalf of economic power on one side and, on the other side, we aim to rehabilitate the forces committed to an aesthetic revision and to the deconstruction of entrenched paradigms rooted in European culture, predominant until that moment in Brazil. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 52 In this sense, concerning Literature and the production of the period, the understanding of each author’s trajectory, especially with regard to their “rediscovery” of Brazil, is as important as registering the legacy of iconic authors of the Modern Movement, such as the contributions by Mário and Oswald. To a great extent, Brazilian Modernism embraced the founding myth of racial harmony despite its lack of correspondence to the socio-institutional spheres. In Mário de Andrade we identify an initial step towards an effective reappraisal of this stance, taking the form of an awareness of the immensity of the Brazilian territory still to be “discovered”, as we can see in the poem Descobrimento: Benched at my desk in São Paulo In my house on Lopes Chaves street Suddenly I felt a chill inside. I was shaky, very moved with the silly book looking at me. Can’t you see that I remembered that there in the North, my God! so far away from me In the active darkness of the night that has fallen A thin pale man with hair streaming down into his eyes, After making a skin with the daily rubber Has just gone to bed; he is sleeping. This man is a Brazilian like me. The search for an identity synthesis that could unite the regions of Brazil in Mario de Andrade’s notion of “a Brazilian like me” becomes a kind of literary utopia. Meanwhile, The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 53 Brazilian reality pointed in another direction, as evidenced by the laws of repression that came into force in the recently-proclaimed Federative Republic of Brazil. One of these instances, as points out Antonio Simas, was the Vagrancy Law (1890) which, shortly after the abolition of slavery, in 1890, aimed at keeping the recently freed slaves under a tight rein. The Penal Code thus provided for a penalty of 15 to 30 days for “vagrants and capoeiristas”, characterized as those “failing to exercise a profession, trade, or any occupation which earns a living; not having means of subsistence and a known domicile; or earning subsistence by means of occupation prohibited by law, or manifestly offensive to morals and good customs” (Simas, 3). In mentioning the “capoeiristas” — a mixture of dance and martial art performed by the slaves — the legal excerpt carries explicit reference to the social group its force was directed at. The New Republic was committed to alienating those who did not have a job or a fixed dwelling, targeting the black populations of cities, particularly Rio de Janeiro, then the nation’s capital. The social structure thus perpetrated a system of humiliations toward those who did not have the means of subsistence, shortly after the proclamation of the Lei Aurea (1888), Brazil’s law of abolition. The segregation practices from the time of slavery were thus written into law and became an integral part of the systematic ordering of cities. The model sustained by capital in favor of the elite was updated, and it was in the cities that the system appeared most flagrantly. Simas observes that the first governments in Rio de Janeiro incriminated the various manifestations of popular culture - almost all of them markedly linked to the Africas that existed in the streets of the city. Playing capoeira The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 54 was made a crime by the Penal Code of 1890, and [the religious practice of] macumba was systematically repressed. The possession of a tambourine was enough for the police to charge the samba dancer with the law against vagrancy. (4) The civilizing force, translated into violence either against indigenous peoples or against enslaved individuals, was undertaken in Brazil since colonial times. Simas observes that “there is no record of public initiatives seeking to integrate former slaves to the full exercise of citizenship and to the formal job market”. On the contrary, the immigration process “was encouraged as a means of whitening the population and instituting western habits among” Brazilian people (5). The Portuguese legal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos proposes that this is a process of epistemicide: the deliberate effacement of local forms of knowledge through assimilation. The mechanisms of social structuring that dominated during the time of slavery were thus strategically altered so as to be transposed and to remain in effect in the Republic. Despite Oswald de Andrade’s efforts to incorporate local tones, the events surrounding the Week of Modern Art contained aspects of an aesthetic assimilation. A disparity between literature and reality remained. Part of this “disparity” came from a lack of understanding, by the first-phase modernist authors, of the mechanisms of social structuring, stemming from a biased view of the Brazilian social matrix. The well-known voyage of the modernist group, including Oswald de Andrade and Mario de Andrade, to the historic cities of Minas Gerais, in 1924, was a key moment in the formation of a new aesthetic perception. They were joined by Goffredo da Silva Telles, René Thiollier, Tarsila do Amaral, Olívia Guedes Penteado and Blaise Cendrars, the Swiss-born poet (Batista, 288). Cendrars was The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 55 Oswald’s last link with the historical avant-garde and an important figure in the perception of the exceptional qualities of the baroque works found in Minas Gerais. The trip was part of an aesthetic mobilization which played an important role in the consolidation of the formal characteristics of Brazilian modernism. There is a widespread sense of amazement in the accounts of the historic trip that took place only two years after the Week of Modern Art. In the article “Brazil’s Religious Art in Minas Gerais”, Mario de Andrade observes that: “it was in this oscillating milieu of inconsistencies — eighteenth-century Minas Gerais — that the most characteristic religious art of Brazil developed. There, the Church could, freer from the influences of Portugal, protect a more uniform style, more original than the pruned, aulic, opinion-less ones in other centers” (4). Mario concludes that “the churches, some built by more acclimatized Portuguese and some by autochthonous artisans, probably like Aleijadinho — these unaware of Rio and Bahia — took on a much more determined and, we might say, much more national character” (5). Batista points to a similar perception in a later testimony by Tarsila do Amaral, the painter of Abaporu: recently arrived from Europe, I felt dazzled before the popular decorations of the houses of São João del-Rei, Tiradentes, Mariana, Congonhas do Campo, Sabará, Ouro Preto and other small cities of Minas, full of popular poetry. A return to tradition, to simplicity (...) Aleijadinho, in his statues and in the brilliant lines of his religious architecture, everything was a reason for our admiring exclamations. I found in Minas the colors that I adored as a child (Botelho, 180) The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 56 The sensibility mediated by Tarsila do Amaral through a gaze “newly arrived from Europe”, demonstrates the procedures under which the “ex-optic” was represented. The acquired gaze is described as an experience of “passing through”, “full of admiring exclamations”. Its valuation is based on the personal experience of the painter’s childhood. This reaffirms the intention of celebrating — even if anthropophagically — an aesthetic synthesis of our identity under Modern tenets. Early modernism thus left aside the more problematic relationship with the segregatory practices of the State, which had been in force in Brazil since the early years of slave politics: If we understand the relationship of confrontation - in which the State is an adversary to be defeated - and of negotiation in which the State is a possible ally whose means of action are desirable, but whose end is distinct - I think that the main difference is more in the second pole, that of “negotiation”. The tension between the cultural movement and the State would be in the incompatibility of means, together with the divergence of ends (objectives) and the convergence in the object of action (civil society). While the social movement (in the classical model) organizes itself to demand from the State a change in the redistribution structure of resources (material or relative to political power), the cultural movement seeks, through the state apparatus, to undertake a change in the cultural matrix of society. (183) The widely documented trip to Minas Gerais is perhaps a more profound moment of contact with Brazil’s roots, partially intuited by the modernists in their previous incursions into the lively Rio carnival, where the city’s multicultural splendor would have shown itself in the early twentieth century. But the modernist incursion to the interior of Brazilian The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 57 southeast states, such as Minas Gerais, was founded on a cosmopolitan worldview acquired in Paris and a class ethos shaped in São Paulo, as we have seen. The clash between these realities might have seemed like a “voyage to another world”, one characterized by picturesque landscapes. In the case of the historic cities of Minas Gerais, the beauty of the architectural ensemble built by Aleijadinho, the famous Brazilian baroque architect and sculptor, impressed the modernists. Aleijadinho was the son of the Portuguese master builder and architect Manuel Francisco Lisboa and “his” African slave Isabel, and was himself born a slave, in 1730. This fact reaffirms the drama of the structural construction of a Brazil forged in profound cruelty. The cultural historian Walter Benjamin, in his famous text On the Concept of History, argues that “there was never a cultural monument that was not also a monument to the barbaric” (232). I believe that we can take this idea as a paradigm to understand how the monumentality of the nation’s cultural cornerstones imposed itself on the critical consciousness of the Brazilian elite. Though the modernists might not have had a full understanding of the nation’s structural inequality at the time, the problem also involved reconciling the aesthetic tenets of European Modernism and regional Brazilian expressions, within the field of literature. The translation and gradual transposition of a new set of tenets was itself a means of opposition to the Academic conservatives — these perhaps even more committed to the preservation of the status quo. This cultural clash involved defining the principles that would reshape Brazilian institutions. The modernist voyage to the historic cities of Minas serves as theme for a series of articles by Mário de Andrade who, at the time, was an employee of the Ministry of Education The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 58 under the command of Gustavo Capanema. Mário’s institutional affiliation brings about the question of the role of intellectuals in Brazilian State policies at the time. In the essay “Modernism as a cultural movement: a political sociology of culture”, André Botelho emphasizes that “treating Modernism as a cultural movement implies discussing it as a mode of collective action, at least initially, frankly institutionalized, but which, when seeking to produce cultural changes in society as a whole, finds itself constrained to interact in a conflictive and collaborative way with the state” (177). Conflict of interests and intricacies of public policies are here emphasized with regard to an appropriation of culture and its conformation to an official perspective. The construction of official public policies, just as the efforts to capture Brazilianness through the picturesque landscape of Brazil’s interior, did not significantly contemplate the events related to the violent process of slavery and its social consequences. Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and São Paulo had been leading states in the trade that involved the exploitation of slave labor, a lucrative machinery at the root of inequality, with consequences up to our present-day society. As the carioca historian Luis Antônio Simas explains, Rio de Janeiro, replacing Salvador, became the world’s largest slave trade port after the transfer of the trade machine from the Northeast to the Southeast of Brazil: “The experience of African slavery in the Americas is, strictly speaking, an experience of dispersion, fragmentation, breaking of associative ties and death, symbolic and literal. It is also, at the same time, an experience of constant reconstruction of practices of cohesion, invention of identities, dynamization of sociability and life” (1). The author also observes the consequences of this process in social formation: “[…] African cultures, apparently shattered by the fragmentation brought about The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 59 by the experience of captivity, were redefined with the creation in Brazil, and more specifically in Rio de Janeiro, of associative institutions (zungus, terreiros de santo, carnival associations, etc.) construction, maintenance and promotion of community identities” (2). Thus, while the search for Brazilian roots elsewhere fascinated the moderns, a deep restructuring of society was taking place at the base of the major Brazilian cities. The fundamental perceptions that guide the first phase modernist sensibility, and that bequeathed us seminal works as Macunaíma (1928), can be seen today as somewhat diluted in the passing fascination of the voyages, in the romanticized aesthetics of poverty, and in the folkloric syntheses that suppressed violence. They form the basis of the founding myths that undermined the structural conditions in favor of an aesthetic autonomy belonging to the cosmopolitan character of major cities but that ignored its founding layers. This perspective clouded the perception of Culture as a complex set of invisibilities in favor of an idealized collective inflection which suppressed individualities. It operates from a game of interests that makes certain manifestations visible, without elucidating the material conditions related to the production of modern works. It pertains to a “civilizing” clash that modernizes so as to serve the elites, forging criteria intuited as “cultural”: to modernize without fundamentally altering the social structures, which would have meant an expansion of access to republican benefits. This process unfolds itself in a series of strategies which erased constitutional rights and resulted in social alienation, particularly through the obliteration of the symbolic representations pertaining to those caught within the black Diaspora, of which Brazil was one of the main perpetrators. The agricultural elite operated a systematic replacement of its The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 60 labor force in face of abolition, adapting to social and demographic changes in order to maintain profits and thus perpetuating domination and inequality. Citing Frantz Fanon, Simas notes that racism inherited from colonialism manifests itself explicitly - and most fiercely on the basis of physical violence, but not only there. Discrimination is also established from the diminishing of the symbolic goods of those whom colonialism tries to subject: beliefs, dances, food, worldviews, ways of celebrating life, burying the dead, educating children, etc. The discourse of the European colonizer in relation to the indigenous and the African established the idea that they would be naturally backward, dispossessed of history. Only elements external to them – science, Christianity, representative democracy, the market economy, the Western school, etc. – could insert them into what we imagine to be the history of humanity. It is the attempt, in short, to impose a homogeneous world view. (Simas, p. 3) Thus, while public institutions established policies around broad cultural lines, repressive mechanisms reached every level of society and operated on the specific. A deeper, more complex incursion into the interior of Brazil, far from the network of coastal cities like Rio de Janeiro, will be the task of the second phase modernist authors. These authors would be committed to the representation of regional inequality through works such as Vidas Secas, by Graciliano Ramos, and Grande sertão Veredas, by João Guimarães Rosa, both dealing with life and survival in the arid regions of Brazil. This represents a significant shift, though discussions on the structure of inequality sometimes appear as a schematic backdrop to the oppression suffered by the characters individually. The works have the merit, however, of seeking to penetrate social layers in search of individuality through the composition of vernacular character and regional landscapes. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 61 2. Cruelty and perception of a deep Brazil From the 1940s onwards, there is a renewal of postulates by the second generation modernism with a growing interest in the investigation of Brazilian social structure. Structural inequality had been present in the works of pre-modernist authors, such as Lima Barreto, who had harshly criticized first phase modernism in what he believed to be a literature produced for the ruling class. A renewed approach to social issues gradually displaces the utopian Brazilianness linked to the avant-garde and its manifestos. After the heroic years surrounding an initial radical and wide-ranging reformulation, thus, a less monumental literary production emerges, operating a fundamental revision by addressing the controversial episodes of our cultural formation. Dense works, concerned with aspects of Brazil’s slave-holding past, loaded with silences and traumas, will deepen the regional and social characteristics of this formation process. From a contemporary perspective, in the wake of the recent revisionist movements that are essential to the inclusion of black, silenced and invisible voices, I propose to make a brief reflection on the work of the Brazilian author Cornélio Penna (1896-1958). Placing his literary production in the period of the so-called second phase Modernism, Penna adds complexity to the regional approach and to the structural issues of Brazilian formation. From the publishing of his first novel Fronteira, the author “walks” the stony roads of Minas Gerais: its mineral aridity a symbolic representation of the Brazilian territory. Unlike the Minas Gerais imagined in the first modernist voyages in 1924, however, Penna inaugurates a third way, seeking an aesthetic and social convergence. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 62 Cornélio Penna develops his work around a landscape of social decadence, setting his literary production in the suffocating spaces of the waning plantation system, where an atmosphere of terror, to which the enslaved were subjected, formed a network of physical and psychological violence. Penna will be particularly interested in the interior spaces which are kept from the public eye. The reader is allowed to see how these spaces are conformed: rooms, bedrooms, slave quarters; environments not often explored in the literary production of the period. In these spaces, subjectivity replaces the idea of character “types” and of the unspecific representations of the collective of earlier works. The “interior” of these spaces, in the labyrinthine plantation, reveals unsuspected nuances of the pictorial representations of the period. The character construction finds parallel in the complex construction of the local landscape. Cornélio’s work is ahead of its time, imagining a voice for black people and especially for black women, giving these characters unprecedented depth and individuality. The nuanced representation of spaces and characters is a key element of the Penna’s critical approach, allowing a fuller understanding of the social framework within which individuals move. This construction, unusual at the time, finds parallel in our current literature. The novels Quarto de despejo, by Carolina Maria de Jesus, Um defeito de cor, by Ana Maria Gonçalves, Torto Arado, by Itamar Vieira Júnior, O avesso da pele, by Jefferson Tenório, among others, are recent examples of the representation of silenced versions of history. At the height of modernity, in the 1930s and 1940s, Brazil was expanding economically, greatly due to the unequal working conditions that dated back to slavery and that would produce a stratified and oppressive social structure. Cornélio Penna sets his novels precisely The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 63 in this process of silencing, around that which is not usually mentioned, but which screams and increasingly requires a more accurate look. The author returns to the oppressive atmosphere of slavery through a different perspective. Setting his plots around the manor house and in the daily routine of the plantation, Penna portrays a dark panorama of the relations that opposed slaves and masters, examining the proximity between cruelty and religion and exposing how power was secured through torture: an immersion in relationships that constituted the Brazilian people, but often remained suppressed by rigid moral and religious codes. This was an insidious atmosphere left by slavery, with its wide spectrum of cruelty and submission, humiliation and pain. Penna’s novels present a third way: neither the exotic, portrayed by the Brazilian avantgarde as a positive trait, nor the more schematic and sometimes shallow denunciation of inequality, found in the initial regionalist approach by the second-phase Modernists. The author adds psychological components to the character development, establishing a refined connection between the broader social structures and their implications on the psyche of different social groups and individuals. The portrayal not only gives depth to the characters but also reveals the inner workings of structural inequality. In his last novel, A Menina Morta (The Dead Girl), from 1958, this structure gains monumental contours. The Manor House, the nervous center of the Grotto Farm, constitutes a microcosm; a terrifying synthesis of the oppressive social relations prevailing in the hierarchy of the 19th century coffee plantations. The plot revolves around the death of a child who perishes after hearing a secret from her mother. The book, inspired by the story of the author’s maternal aunt, the Baroness of Paraná, is a vertiginous dive into the stratified The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 64 structure of Brazilian society in the 19th century, outlining a suffocating environment where death announces itself in every room. This can be seen in the author’s description of the procedures of one of the domestic slaves, shortly after the child’s death, revealing an intricate relationship between psychological state, daily chores and social strata: now it was for death that he was working, to help it take away the Little Sinhá to a place where you can’t come back, and he hurried on without needing the overseer to come see if he was really working, if he followed orders well. But the black inspector also had teary eyes when he told him what to do on that bright morning, under the glaring white sun, which seemed threatening and suffocating to all the residents of Grotto. (15) As he walks us through the different spaces of the plantation’s environment, the author uncovers an entwined network of relationships and reveals racism as a structural reality, present more or less evidently in everyday practices. Breaking with this structure was also breaking with something that had always been at the base of the “civilizing” process. Since colonial times, Brazilian society was founded on power relations that oppressed the weakest and increasingly strengthened the elites. In another passage, we see how the child’s sister is also caught and moves within this structural reality: everyone walked in darkness, looking for one another, she thought confusedly, and the blinding light of day gave her black hunting dress a strange appearance, as the absence of shimmer seemingly negated the sun itself. She was entirely alone on the terrace, as life on the farm continued to seem suspended and the blacks had not left the slave quarters, where they had voluntarily shut themselves up. (532) The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 65 The author thus adds spatial and hierarchical complexity to the regionalist approach and explores the psychological component of this ambience. The violent strategies of domination since colonial times can also be seen in the ordering and fragmentation within the slave quarters: “the part of the slave quarters inhabited by single black women became busy as soon as the sun illuminated the bars of the windows overlooking the valley. Women dressed in coarse and near-white chimangos, their very black arms sticking out, spoke in low voices and gesticulated nervously. Some of the older ones spoke African words in the excitement they were in but could not understand each other because they had been brought from different nations on purpose, so that they would not form separate groups, through the secret language of a single dialect (Penna, p. 75). Penna describes how the quarters are constructed under a meticulous order for control, with the separation of individuals through a deliberate choice of origins. The author thus establishes a network of relationships between the local structure and the broader geography of slave trade. In contrast to the production of the period, here blacks also have voices; and plot revenge as a way of escaping the oppression suffered by them. The conflicts are not resolved but laid out within the permanent social tensions. In his four novels, published between 1939 and 1958, Penna will examine some, unsuspected aspects of the construction of a nation that neither pass through the modernist paradigm of the first phase, nor fita into a more schematic regionalism. The contrast between the manor house and the slave quarters stands out as two spaces of social and geographic circumscription and can be taken as symbolic representation The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 66 of what happens on a larger scale in Brazil. If, on the one hand, there is opulence and plenty, on the other, what stands out is scarcity and precariousness. To elect the paradigm of a canonic modernism as a portrait of Brazil’s rupture with the colonial social structure would imply the election of one among many counter-cultural possibilities in the early twentieth century. Literature, perceived as image and transfiguration of reality, as Antônio Cândido alerts us, is a fundamental element of our perception of Brazilianness. The strategies that were used to cover up or to uncover the most cruel moments of our society are a part of the construction of our nationality and reappear in the recent historic revisions. The writer Cornélio Penna gives Modernism of the second phase its critical commentary by constructing, under the optic of the nightmare, one more face of the varied spectrum of the Brazilian symbolic imaginary. His work reminds us that in order to build a future Brazil, it is essential to revisit the controversial episodes of our past. This would also be a commitment of Literature, when building imaginaries more consistent with the plurality of a Culture. It is from the present that we can better perceive the real dimension of these temporalities. They are built in a continuous effort so that the horrors perpetrated by the slaveholding elites are shown in contrast to inclusion and reparation. WORKS CITED Andrade, Mario de. A Arte Religiosa do Brasil em Minas Gerais. Experimento, 1993. Andrade, Oswald de. Manifesto Antropófago (1928). https://www.ufrgs.br/cdrom/oandrade/oandrade.pdf The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 67 Andrade, Oswald de. Manifesto Pau Brasil (1924). https://www.ufrgs.br/cdrom/oandrade/oandrade.pdf Batista, Eduardo. Blaise Cendrars – “O Terceiro Elemento do Movimento Pau Brasil.” 2011. https://periodicos.fclar.unesp.br/itinerarios/article/view/4865 Benjamin, Walter. Obras escolhidas. Vol. 1. Magia e técnica, arte e política. Ensaios sobre literatura e história da cultura. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987. Botelho, André. “O Modernismo como movimento cultural: Uma sociologia política da Cultura.” Lua Nova Revista de Política e Cultura, 2020. https://www.scielo.br/j/ln/a/zWhrs3mJWv8pPTLJ3wp3dMn/ Castro, Ruy. Metrópole a beira-mar. O Rio moderno dos anos 20. Companhia das Letras, 2019. Cardoso, Rafael. Modernidade em preto e branco. Arte e imagem, raça e identidade no Brasil, 1890-1945. Companhia das Letras, 2022. Penna, Cornélio. A Menina morta. Artium, 2001. Simas, Luis Antônio. “Dos arredores da Praça Onze aos terreiros de Oswaldo Cruz: Uma cidade de pequenas Áfricas.” DOS-ARREDORES-DA-PRAÇA-ONZE-AOS-TERREIROSDE-OSWALDO-CRUZ_-UMA-CIDADE-DE-PEQUENAS-ÁFRICAS-–-Revista-ZCultural.pdf (ufrj.br). Revista do Programa Avançado de Cultura Contemporânea. Segundo semestre, 2021. Vieira Santos, Flavia. Transgressão melancolia e mal na Obra de Cornélio Penna. Doctoral Thesis. Rio de Janeiro: PUC-Rio, 2008. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Vieira 68 QUOTE AS: Flávia Vieira. Modernity in Cornelio Penna. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 47-68 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 69 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF HAUNTING: CAN THE BRAZILIAN RELINQUISH ITS FOUNDATIONS? by PEDRO DAHER The existence of this supposed racial equality constitutes (...) the biggest reason behind the national pride, the most sensible note sustaining the Brazilian moral ideology, insistently and intransigently cultivated - Nascimento (41, my translation). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 70 Our living-writing [escrevivência] isn’t meant to lull the ones from the Big House (Casa Grande) but rather to wake them from their unjust dreams (...) These past 130 years since abolition, to me, are 130 years of reclaiming (...) To talk about racial prejudice in Brazil is to take down the myth of racial democracy. Any Brazilian, black or white, has to be extremely naïve or cynical if they want to state that we have unproblematic racial relations. This has already been denounced - Canofre (“Conceição Evaristo”, my translation from an interview excerpt with Conceição do Evaristo) At least since 1859, when Maria Firmina dos Reis published her novel Úrsula, the notion that Brazil exists as a racially democratic nation has been discursively debunked 1. The central lie which informed the country’s formation and (self-)representation had been challenged from within representation itself – even before it became official discourse. Nevertheless, the nation marked by its productive differences is still haunted by its two foundational myths [the whitening ideal and racial democracy] and the different modes through which they are constantly redeployed [e.g., the modernistas project]. The 2019 samba-enredo of the samba school Acadêmicos da Mangueira performed in Rio de Janeiro’s carnaval harbored a radical political message and convocation toward social struggle to resist the (re)new(ed) iteration 1 Refer to Silêncios Prescritos, Fernanda Miranda’s powerful literary analysis for an in-depth look into Maria Firmina dos Reis and other black women Brazilian writers (R. Miranda). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 71 of violence running the country by imagining a nation thriving because of its generative differences – whose subjection has meant the creation and sustaining of the nation. Hence, since difference continues to guide emancipatory political projects, it is difficult not to return to the perhaps first cultural movement which tried to deploy it toward a revolution, that is, the modernistas of 1922. Their national project informed generations of intellectuals and their reading of what was the Brazilian (subject, culture, nationhood, etc.) lingers on. I will investigate Mangueira’s lyrics to look at the similarities between the school’s imagining and denunciation of the country’s current moment and the issues the modernistas were raising and imagining. I will wonder if Mangueira was able to escape the traps set/faced by the modernistas, if it repeated the same themes with distinguished/identical results, or if it is purely the same project. For, as it will be argued, moving away from the 1922 group of thinkers is required if Brazil is to not only admit its structural racism and gender violence as fundamental to how the country came to be but also to try to come up with something new for the future-now, especially in terms of social relationships and economic justice 2. The overlaps between Brazilian modernism and the social scientific text will not be explored in this text, as I have written elsewhere about the latter 3. It is crucial to reiterate that difference 2 The country’s future-present is always locked between racial democracy and the whitening ideal. In 2019, the latter has returned to the fundamental basis of how Brazilian society is organized. Refer to Thomas Skidmore’s Black into White wherein he explains the whitening ideal by revealing that the abolitionist campaign in Brazil was dominated not by a desire to truly emancipate, create mechanisms of reparations and social equality for the black population, nor tackling racism as formative of our social relationships. 3 Refer to “Finish the Eulogy, Brazil” (Daher, 2018), in which I discuss the works of Gilberto Freyre, Ricardo Benzaquen de Araújo, and Roberto DaMatta (among others). The first two write the text of racial democracy, the second repeats it in the late 20th century, responsible for articulating the Brazilian Subject through four basic pillars: hybridity, miscegenation, balance of antagonisms, and heterogeneity. Simply put: Freyre and Benzaquen deny the existence of racial differentiation to present the inherently democratic miscegenated Subject, as Ferreira da Silva has written extensively The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 72 was at the center of both the artists and social scientific texts; thus, while a larger investigation of the concept will not be pursued in this piece, difference will be surrounding this text while also intermittently being at its center 4. Informing my reading of the similarities and differences between the 1920s artists and Mangueira’s samba-enredo is Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work in general; however, more specifically, I will draw from ‘Bahia Pêlo Negro’ - Can the subaltern (subject of raciality) speak?, where she reads Bloco do Olodum’s 1988 carnaval song to argue that a refusal of wanting to signify a proper modern Subject is not only crucial. More importantly, the group’s lyrics “[are] defined in terms of a political struggle that marks their existence in post-Enlightenment social configurations”(Ferreira da Silva, “‘Bahia Pêlo Negro’” 321). In other words: demarcating a space for struggle not ruled by modern ontoepistemological assumptions (or, in her terms, transparency), is possible. I’ll about. The third, albeit critiquing the formulation of Freyre and Benzaquen, still tends to disavow racism as constitutive of Brazilian social relations, reducing Brazilian sociality to class and hierarchy. 4 I chose “intermittently” because it’s a central image in a poem Mário de Andrade wrote, which I believe summarizes his (and the modern art week’s) ideas: “The Troubadour//Sentiments in me of the harshness/of the men of the primeval epochs.../The vernal seasons of sarcasm/intermittently in my harlequinate heart.../Intermittently.../Other times it is a sick man, a chill/in my sick soul like a long round sound.../Cantabona! Cantabona!/Dlorom.../I am a Tupi Indian strumming a lute!” Here one sees the theme of anthropophagy and the predicament of the Brazilian Subject: he is the result of Portuguese, African and Indigenous encounter, living in and representing from within the cauldron of differences that marks Brazil as a nation – hence, the question: how can a miscegenated/mulato population be self-determined, that is, how can it be modern? Brazil is the place of mixtures: the lute is an Arab instrument, popularized in Europe (especially during the Renaissance), played by an indigenous person in a poem written by a mulato. The project of the modernistas was to carve out a place for and prove that Brazil was a modern nation: modern in political, economic, and juridical terms and, most importantly, modern in cultural terms. Their goal, in terms of art, was to bring Brazilian art to the same pace, to the same place, as the European avant-gardes (Surrealism, especially), while demarcating the nation’s intrinsic (cultural) difference. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 73 also look at Alexandre Nodari’s work to see the generative limits of modernism’s anthropophagy-concept. About Brazilian Modernismo It is important to explain that by modernistas I refer to Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade. I am operating a reduction of Brazilian Modernism to these São Paulo artists and thinkers because they have become the universal regarding the movement. Modernismo in Brazil, however, is much larger and included practitioners from all over the country (Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Norte, Rio de Janeiro, Maranhão, etc.) I centralize them not because they are the only ones, but because, for several reasons, they have become enshrined as the movement’s references 5. Arguably Oswald de Andrade’s most remembered writings are his two manifestoes, that is, Manifesto Antropófago and Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil. A similar point could be made concerning Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma. Even though Paulicéia Desvairada is frequently celebrated, the story of the “hero without (any) character” is not only constantly reviewed but is very much still part of the country’s daily culturalartistic imagination. What was, or were, the main concern(s) these three artists had when creating their works? Which questions were they trying to answer and challenge? Finally, how much are their ideas, propositions, imaginations, projects, imagings, still informing how Brazilian popular culture thinks, creates, and regenerates itself? Is the country doomed to 5 In “A Semana de cem anos”, part of a series of lectures reflecting on Brazilian Modernism titled “Ciclo 1922: modernismos em debate”, Fred Coelho goes over the universalization of São Paulo’s modernism (modernismo paulista) and how it became enshrined as the throne of Brazilian Modernism years after the week of 1922 took place while discussing the “other” Brazilian modernisms. Coelho also highlights the radical possibilities that the week of 1922 still harbor to “mobilize the machines of possible futures”, despite its “limitations” (Coelho). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 74 forever inhabit the same issues facing the modernistas back in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s? Is there a way out? Or, rather, is a way out the wrong question? The objectives and ponderings which inform the two manifestos written by Oswald are very similar: how to bring the popular into the erudite, or how to make the erudite popular, trace/seek a mode of existing which isn’t defined by the country’s “doctorate side”, which was a “fatality” imposed by the first arrived white man, and, by doing this, start a process of poetry (art) exportation, that is, move Brazil from the condition of importer and reproducer of European art to a leading role as exporter of influencing and defining artistic practice. He opens the Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil by stating that “poetry exists in (the) facts”. During this declamation, he goes to accumulate, juxtapose, and mixture countless images, attempting to invoke the “cauldron of differences” that Brazil represented. Hence, his constant celebrations of/pointing out/homage to carnaval; his claim that “this is the moment of reacting against appearance”, that is, striving for a “sentimental, intellectual, ironic, and naïve” perspective; his declaration that “our time announces the return to pure sense”, the necessity of having “no formula to the contemporary expression of the world. To see with free eyes”; and, finally, “reaction against every wisdom indigestion. The best of our lyric tradition. The best of our modern demonstration”. The Manifesto Antropófago brings home the approximation with daily life and indigenous perspectives Oswald is invoking – while finishing the demonstration of Brazilian modernity: “we want the Caraíba revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. The unification of all effective revolts towards man”; “Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of Taboo into Totem”; “before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness”. While his manifestos provoke distinct readings 6, the nationalization of the Brazilian space-culture-history through 6 See, for example, Beatriz Azevedo’s Antropofagia – Palimpsesto Selvagem and Sara Castro- Klaren’s “A Genealogy for the “Manifesto Antropofago,” or the Struggle between Socrates and the Caraibe”. The former is a line-by-line analysis of the “Manifesto Antropófago” that embraces Oswald’s anthropophagy as “heterodox and pluralistic” (192) that refuses the “Brazilian being/Subject [ser brasileiro]” (191) while the latter critiques Oswald’s “technified natural man” and teleological-dialectic reading of history that would end with the revolution of the matriarchy. Klaren The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 75 a displacement of the primacy of European thought (while still adopting it as fundamental) and an embrace of the indigenous is the central point. Not only there is a search for and writing of the Brazilian culture and Subject. More importantly, there is the seeking of something that modernity had lost which is already found for the Brazilian has the indigenous within him, that is, the Brazilian already represents the infinite mixtures/miscegenations which give rise to a nation which is marked, defined, by possessing what European modernity has lost: the authentic experience of being human. It is only a matter of removing superficial bourgeois aesthetics and thought from life to unveil what the country/the national subject already is having the indigenous as its pillar. Reviewing the political, metaphysical, and artistic project of Andrade in “Coloniality, Transculturation and National Identity in the Brazilian Modern Anthropophagy”, Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso provides an extremely needed investigation into anthropophagy as a modernist concept of dangerous racialized abstractions. Cardoso convincingly finds that anthropophagy is a continuation of “colonial politics” since it soothes white bourgeois liberal society’s anxieties and creates/repeats the failure of Brazilian difference: The black figure, in fact, constantly present and, simultaneously marginalized in the urban culture addressed by anthropophagy, is almost entirely erased (...) indigenous culture, on the other hand, a structural element for the anthropophagic project, appears abstractly and idealized, with no reference to its real and concrete population who fought, and still fights, for its survival and the continuation of its cultures within the national territory against an ongoing ethnocide commanded by the very same white, Portuguese-speaking elites who received an European education (110, 115; my translation) also critiques Oswald’s mobilization of anthropophagy by stating that “despite his affinities with Nietzsche’s critique of Western philosophy, Oswald was simply not prepared to understand or develop the full implications of Tupi meta\physics” (311). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 76 In another critical work of that reviews anthropophagy, Zita Nunes’ Cannibal Democracy explores the concept of cannibalism to analyze the dimension of Brazilian representation as the concept which guided the formation of Brazil’s national identity. Nunes explores the concept of the remainder, that is, how miscegenation as a fundamental characteristic of the nation ends up creating something that becomes excluded instead of an exclusion being what generates the national characteristic: “the model of cannibalism clarifies the extent to which the remainder is the effect of a process. In relation to the eaten, this remainder can be seen either as a rejection of the eaten by the national body or as the resistance posed by the eaten to assimilation. Thus, the power of the remainder is that it is neither (or not only) a constitutive absence nor an ‘other,’ in that it is produced by the system rather than preceding it” (14). For Nunes, the reliance upon cannibalism to construct the national identity moves in two directions: the supremacy of the white being the one who eats and creates a new dimension of representation for the nation and to a more ambivalent position in which the remainder is neither fully rejected nor embraced. The remainder, for Nunes, is blackness. Modernismo, therefore, deals with blackness by making it impossible as constitutive of the nation’s identity and subject: “the creation of a national Brazilian identity, however, takes place on two fronts. In relation to Europe, it provided for a radical questioning and reformulation of the hierarchies engendered by colonialism. In relation to the black, mulatto, and indigenous populations inside Brazil, the model of cannibalism provided the means to create (if only in theory and deferred to the future) a homogeneous and stable national identity” (11). In Oswald’s work, Nunes finds that the move from miscegenation as a negative element into the uniquely positive aspect of Brazilian culture to justify the country’s modernity gives way to the domination of the white element over others: “this reinterpretation gave rise to a model of identity formation that resolved the question of difference through the incorporation and assimilation of that difference, thereby ensuring the identity of the dominant (socially, economically, politically) white. It is this last point that we must keep in mind while reading the first lines of the ‘Manifesto Antropófago’: (Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically)” (39). For Nunes, Oswald represents the anxiety of a white elite that must create a national identity in the face of miscegenation. These conflicting desires and impulses are not solely confined to Oswald’s work. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 77 While I won’t dwell in a long exploration of Macunaíma, the main questions occupying Mário de Andrade’s project, as José Miguel Wisnik has pointed out, were to think about Brazil as a country that was entering into the urban-industrial modern world, especially departing from São Paulo as perspective, a big city, a mark of civilization - made of fragments, differences, multiplicities, one big frantic cauldron; another preoccupation was to think Brazil as a whole and not just a Modern, big-city civilized type of nation – there was a concern with the “urban-modern” and the “immense rural/forest extensions”. Their goal was both international (putting Brazil in dialogue with all the great modern nations, proving that it belonged to the pantheon) and a moment of rediscovering Brazil, its folklore, “interior” traditions, which would be key to organizing the project of the nationalization of a Brazilian Modern Culture. Thus, Mário’s hero witnesses Brazil’s intrinsic difference from the fact that there exists an infinite amount of popular culture outside the urban centers while the urban centers are the perfect example of the country’s development as a civilized, modern society that feeds from said popular culture. It is precisely because Brazil hadn’t (hasn’t) found a way to balance these “antagonisms” that Macunaíma, the black-indigenous-white anti-hero protagonist of the book, is lost between the city and nature, confused whether to embrace capitalism or popular folklore. Finally, his death at the end of the book cannot be read as a simple narrative mechanism. He decides to die because his task is impossible. What is crucial here is that Wisnik performs the predicament of Brazilian culture yet again: for him, despite everything he has stated, Macunaíma cannot be seen as a nationalist book, that is, a work which represents a national identity. There is no identity, Wisnik goes on to argue, there’s only a process of mixtures which transforms Brazil into an entity and not an identity. One of the logics behind one of the versions of the text of racial democracy lies precisely in a celebration of miscegenation, in which the latter signifies the infinite processes which (in)form the Brazilian. For Wisnik, therefore, Macunaíma is neither indigenous nor townsman, he is the representation of the national identity formed by the balance of antagonisms. This ambivalence is also highlighted by Zita Nunes. For her, Macunaíma (and other works by Mário) present a stronger ambivalence, since “Mário uses a cannibalistic model to create a more authentic identity. Incorporation takes place in Mário’s texts not to produce a mixture that would be an end in and of itself, but as a process of assimilation that The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 78 will produce the Brazilian” (42-3). Finally, the centrality of the difficulty of sustaining a national project is the central aspect of the modernistas’, as Denise Ferreira da Silva has highlighted in hers Toward a Global Idea of Race: “whether Andrade wrote Macunaíma to signify the Brazilian subject is irrelevant because, like others in the previous decades, modernismo’s apology of the Brazilian subject consistently attributes the nation’s shortcomings to an unruly sexual desire” (299). Miscegenation, the result of the Portuguese unrestrained sexual lust, constitutes the national paradigm: it sustains and halts the country simultaneously. Even though this might seem contradictory, since the modernistas were trying to decrease European influence in Brazilian art, this attempt did not mean abandoning the ontoepistemological assumptions which sustain a certain mode of being. In fact, it was a project to reproduce that mode of being but with the Brazilian touch being the fundamental ingredient informing a re-actualization of what was being, according to them, merely copied over and over. It is not so much that Oswald’s and Mário’s writings are against indigeneity or blackness; more important, it is the trajectory of the latter two into the Brazilian Subject depicted in those frames which opens the gate for a re-assertion of Brazil’s fundamentally radical liberal democratic regime as the country’s ultimate marker which, if only it were to be liberated from the claws of “traditional” Europeanness (politically, metaphysically, artistically), would actualize what already is, but that nevertheless remains trapped. That is, what matters most with the modernistas is that their project is always at the risk of repeating (re-inaugurating) the demon of Brazilian difference because it fails to account for the capitalracial-colonial violence that institutes the nation via difference since it is a project that mobilizes the intrinsically different Brazilian Subject, the harmonized racial people of modernity. This discourse is used, as Silvio Almeida has highlighted, precisely to mask the Brazilian mode of capitalism as non-racist, that is, to hide the reality of racial violence (Almeida, chapter 6)7. It is not that the modernistas would defend racial violence as a system. 7 There is nothing inherently wrong with “racial democracy”, for example (and although Oswald is not associated with it his work is similar to the Brazilian Subject constructed by Gilberto Freyre). As Silvio Almeida highlighted in a recent interview, one can (should) keep the ideal of what racial The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 79 It is because their project maintains a mobilization of the tripartite self-determined Brazilian Subject that it will, wittingly or not, repeat the very logic it longs to undo: capitalism via the arrival of the “first white”. Before engaging with Mangueira, I will engage with Alexandre Nodari to look at a reading of anthropophagy that celebrates it by deepening its meanings instead of embracing them blindly. The limits of Anthropophagy Alexandre Nodari’s “A Única Lei do Mundo” engages with Oswald de Andrade’s work more specifically and other Brazilian modernist writers more generally to provide a review of the movement’s mobilization of Anthropophagy, especially via what they named “Anthropophagic Law”. Nodari investigates the differentiation between “fact” and “law”, that is, how possession (posse) is always already a violent process taken as fact which establishes the juridical-ethical order of private property, which becomes law (in all its senses). Since for him, Anthropophagy requires entities in perpetual devouring of each other without the desire to turn things into properties, it is an exchange of fleeting and ephemeral possessions via a relation between the entities involved in the process of being interested only in what “is not mine”, which is everything. He articulates Oswald’s project as one of “possession against property” which would have as its goal the removal of actual Law from reality, for the latter is responsible for materializing the fiction of property. Because the mode democracy could mean and fight for its actual manifestation. The issue has always been that its usage was (is) deployed to mask Brazil’s structural racism. This has less to do with comparing and asserting Brazil’s similarities and distinctions concerning social relations when compared to other colonized countries. It has to do with the fact that the construction of the Brazilian Subject via (racial and gendered) difference maintains the conditions under which the poor population, majority black and indigenous in its composition, can be made into forever subaltern. It is the deployment of identity (Modern Being) against identity (poor-black-indigenous-women-queer) to solidify identity (Brazilian) — as utopia, racial democracy is beautiful. As reality, it has been atrocious. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 80 of possession inaugurated by colonialism is predicated on a fiction that Law brings into truth, that is, brings property into truth, Nodari argues that Anthropophagic Law strives towards not only land reform but a new mode of sociality: Anthropophagic Law aims to “weaken the subsumption structure that guarantees the nexus of law and its application (...) by aim[ing] at the deactivation of the idea of authenticity” (page). At stake here is an argument that aims at the falseness of Brazil’s claim to its own self-certainty (created via the lies of the law that institute private property — hence, capitalism, colonization, slavery, boundless accumulation, human and nonhuman genocide) by affirming that the “what is mine is not mine”, or, “I’m only interested in what’s not mine”, argues for a mode of possession that does not lead to property. The crux of “possession against property” relies on this: what currently is appears as fact is what fundaments law, that is, what is going on now becomes enshrined into law according to the relations of power being established. Hence Anthropophagic Law wants to live in a way to confirm itself as Law to end Law as it is. That is why the modernists call the entirety of Brazil a grilagem (stealing via falsified-legal documents) conducted by the Europeans: “[the] colonizers [gifted themselves] the monopoly over said right, that is, the right to use facticity against the Other’s right [direito alheio]” (page). Colonization creates its own fiction. Against this, Anthropophagic Law attempts to be the “history of an ‘eternal present’ that can be transformed into infinite foundational gestures” (page). Critical for Nodari, therefore, is a fundamental differentiation between mixture and anthropophagy (“amerindian”): the former presupposes “accumulation, identity, and substance”, that is, “incorporation of the other’s properties into one’s own being” (emphasis original), while the latter is marked by “beings that transform themselves” via “exchange [instead of] accumulation” (page). Or, if I was using this paper’s terms, I would say that for Nodari, mixture keeps the Brazilian Subject while anthropophagy attempts its rupture by witnessing the “essential ontological incompleteness” by denying there is a self who incorporates (page). Therefore, for Nodari, following Oswald, “‘all legislation is dangerous because it adheres like a piece of clothing, impeding the access to the natural” (the natural being entity instead of identity, relation instead of possessing). Every human legislates, however. The question is, rather, how to know that my legislation is a fiction? This is how he answers: “Only what The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 81 I am not, which is not mine proper, produces my inter-est[ed] in (rather, with the) Other, and it is this interest that we have in common. The latter is our inter-being, our world (...) only through the contact with the Other which does not lead to a new property can we produce a common spacetime, that which used to be called Utopia” (page). This profoundly beautiful ending deepens Oswald’s work immensely. What he attempts is to show that the theory of “possession against property” aims at stating that possession itself is impossible because it requires an appropriation and transformation of something into me when there is no identity to be found. My “identity” is the Other, the Other is my “identity”. As Nodari argues, anthropophagy strives for a mode of being that refuses appropriation and only wants relation. In a world marked by Othering in its multitude of ways, the permanent encounter with the “Other”, or with “what is not mine”, is indeed a significant shift in how relations are practiced. At the end, Anthropophagy and Nodari are arguing for a shift of consciousness. I could enter a discussion concerning the need to keep the Other since the other does not exist, but I would like to focus on how Nodari attempts an engagement with modernism’s promise via chronological time as the nexus of law and property, that is, the nexus of violence and appropriation (posse), which leads to the consolidation of the juridical order that re-actualizes violence over and over again. Nodari has an interest in the structure of subsumption conducted by universality (man) and particularity (the anthropophagic subject), but it is a thread that isn’t fully pursued. Because Nodari leads with the anthropophagic desire to, at least, unsettle said structure of subsumption, he opens a line of investigation which allows for the unambiguous denunciation of private property as unescapable violence through private property’s creation and establishment of its own fiction as reality. But the lack of direct engagement with subsumption leaves a somewhat frustrating after-feeling to the piece. How is the “possession against property”, specifically the idea of possession, being redeployed here? How is it challenging the Brazilian Subject? It points to the latter’s fiction turned into reality, and it returns to where we began: subjectivity as the conductor of relation. As an entity using “possession against property”, what is left? What lingers? If the Other as such (identity itself) is the ultimate creation and violence of dominant western modern European thought, what does opening to the Other, to what is not mine, want? If we take Nodari to mean that the point is to destroy the notion of me, precisely the foundational The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 82 structure of modernity itself, then we are pointing towards the end of the (Brazilian) Subject. But if we take Nodari to mean that my opening to the Other maintains the mind structure of (self-)actualization, then we are renaming the same process that has been denounced as fundamentally (if perhaps inevitably) violent. Obviously, these aren’t just two choices. Inbetween them lies the whole of existence. Hence, yet again, we witness a seemingly unsurmountable peak when it comes to the deployment of generative differences (even if via entity instead of identity) within modernismo: the structure that the movement wants to move away from (elite Brazilian modernity) ends up repeating itself because the displacement of identity cannot be concluded for the return of the (Brazilian) Subject transformed into entity is guaranteed. What I mean is simple: even though the modernistas are proposing something which is not the elite’s project exactly, the building of their (cultural-national) project rehearses the deployment of difference as that which coheres the Brazilian nation into being. And coherence into self-understanding is doomed since it can only lead to the structure of subsumption (critiqued by Nodari) that is being fought against for the supposed openness of “entities devouring each other” is returns as closedness since self-coherence as difference deployed to make sense of diversity/The Other is always at hand. Resignification is always important and possible, but it will have limited effects if its structure is maintained. About Mangueira and struggle After reviewing the central concept of the Brazilian modern movement, that is, anthropophagy, and how it organized Brazilian difference, I will return to the central point of this paper: a reading of Mangueira’s samba-enredo for Rio de Janeiro’s 2019 carnaval, titled História pra Ninar Gente Grande, to see how much the modernistas thought haunts Brazilian popular culture. Before, however, I will introduce Bahia Pêlo Negro. In this piece, Ferreira da Silva revisits the relationship between representation, transparency, and difference in order to argue that both the politics of difference and the turn towards the cultural as the marker for a better future proposed by international agencies (the UN, for example) fail to displace the thesis which is responsible for racial and gendered The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 83 difference/exclusion/violence, that is, the transparency thesis itself. She argues that both projects retain the transparency thesis (the scientific and historical/philosophical projects which articulate the irreducible difference between post-enlightenment Europeans and their others) as the ontological presupposition sustaining the globe, that is, precisely what they denounce sustain their projects for social justice. Furthering her proposition, Ferreira da Silva forwards a two-step strategy: 1) a reading of the two moments of consciousness in the Hegelian text (in-itself and for-itself) by rejecting the latter (that is, the moment in which consciousness arises for-itself in the symbolic realm, what she has named the transparent moment of self-consciousness understanding that, in Hegel’s terms, it is “all reality”) to propose a reading in which consciousnesses arise in the former moment, that is, the moment of juridical-economic representation (in which the “subject (...) [is] already an effect of the appropriation of ‘actual conditions of existence’ by social scientific signifiers”) and 2) establishes globality as the “ontological horizon” responsible for gathering and manufacturing the racial and the cultural and how both inform how the globe becomes “a site of expression of the operation of the laws of reason which produce human (mental) differentiation and a site of actualization of the different kinds of consciousness these laws institute (regulate/produce)” (327). After laying this groundwork, Ferreira da Silva reads Bloco do Olodum’s lyrics to argue that it both “displaces the transparency thesis which informs postmodern writings of the subaltern” and “captures how the subaltern subject of raciality emerges in representation as consciousness in-itself (vertreten) but always already before – in an irreducible relationship – with similarly constructed ‘others’” (page). In other words, the subaltern can speak, but only when both whiteness and its others (blackness, indigeneity, in the Brazilian case) emerge in outer-determination for, in that dimension, which institutes globality, neither are capable of “actualizing transparency”. However, this is not a celebratory or victorious claim – after all, this speaking subaltern in the context of globality is precisely who makes “the pair multiculturalism and diversity could so easily become the main goal of the neoliberal agenda for global justice” (332). What one witnesses here is a moment in which transparency stops being the sought after goal, which makes room for a transformation in how social-political struggle is organized. Ferreira da Silva’s reading of Olodum’s lyrics summarizes it best: The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 84 [instead of an] Africa which already encapsulates the black ‘being’, an already emancipated historical subject, consciousness for itself – Olodum introduced in the Brazilian imagination an Africa of ‘becoming’, a signifier of existence by privileging the struggles ensuing as an effect of the moment of consciousness in-itself, in which representation refers to the juridical and economic moments of subjection (...) For what they bring into representation are events in the trajectories of peoples who (successfully or not) resisted European colonization. Madagascar, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Abyssinia, and Pelourinho are, the lyrics proceed, ‘culture which constitute a link of knowledges’. ‘Knowledges’, here, refers not to a shared ‘essence’ but the experience of the struggle to overcome oppression: ‘Struggle and win mischief reality provides/In solidarity we advance our truth’ (334-35). If one wanted to summarize in simple terms, Bloco do Olodum focuses on blackness and class struggle, while Mangueira has what one could name a broader focus, bringing gender and indigeneity to the forefront as well. As Ferreira da Silva has shown, Olodum was able to challenge (historical-philosophical-scientific) representation in order to arise in it without repeating the desire for transparency, which is, as I argued above, precisely what the modernistas did not attempt; their project was to conquer the stage of representation and modify its possibilities. The final question emerges: is Mangueira able to perform a similar movement of escaping from and returning to representation, or even escaping representation entirely? Can the deployment of difference no longer be the guide for justice? First and foremost, Mangueira’s samba, in Tomaz Miranda’s own words, one of the composers, is a call to struggle: “these [truly popular cultural, religious and social] manifestations will play a fundamental role in circumventing the authoritarianism and conservatism that we will face over the new years” (de Souza). The lyrics are explicit in their goal; the second and third verses state: “let me tell you the (hi)story history doesn’t tell” 8. 8 The song’s title is already a provocation. In Portuguese, Histórias pra Ninar Gente Grande, that is, (Hi)stories to Lull Grown-Ups, is a direct comment on the country’s national anthem (which has The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 85 Throughout the enredo, the song calls forth women, tamoios, mulatos, Dandara, cariri, cablocos, people who fought the dictatorship, malês, Marielles, Mahins, Marias 9 and places gained even more adoration since Bolsonaro took office, with his government reinforcing the 1971 law, which received and addendum in 2009, determining that all public and private schools [at the nível fundamental, that is, until Brazil’s ninth grade] sing the anthem on a frequent basis – the law requires a weekly performance). One of the verses of the anthem is “deitado eternamente em berço esplêndido”, that is, “endlessly resting in a splendorous cradle”, and it was mobilized during the enormous 2013 manifestations as an ironic tool: ‘when is the country going to wake up’, the demonstrators asked (the direction the public manifestations followed, that is, toward a more conservative social questioning is not in the scope of this paper). This song, however, subverts not only the original meaning (Brazil is a country of infinite natural riches etc.) but also the current dominant discourse which claims to be performing politics without “ideology”, that is, it challenges the (hi)stories fed by the country’s official narrative and which have made a strong comeback over the past 9 years (e.g., refusal to accept that the dictatorship was a criminal murderous government, calling black, quilombola, and indigenous peoples “bums” who want handouts, etc.). 9 Tamoios refers to an alliance between the Tupinambá, Guaianás and Aimoré indigenous nations who lived in the coastal regions of today’s Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo states. Dandara could be a double reference: the most obvious being the warrior Dandara dos Palmares, one of the leaders of Brazil’s biggest quilombo (maroon) communities, that is, the Quilombo dos Palmares, and also Dandara dos Santos, a trans person killed by 12 men. Cariri refers to the group of languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Sertão (a region similar to the Australian outback – at least in climate conditions). Caboclos means countless things, but taken into account the lyrics, the reference is probably about the caboclos which expelled the Portuguese in Bahia in 1822-23. Marielle is a reference to citycouncil woman Marielle Franco, assassinated in 2018 by Rio de Janeiro’s militias (paramilitary groups formed mostly by ex-police officers). Mahins is a reference to Luíza Mahin, who was fundamental for the Revolt of the Malês, for example, and was the mother of Luís Gama, a black poet and self-taught lawyer who helped free hundreds of slaves. Marias refers to several women (especially because it is in its plural form); Maria da Penha, for example, reference to women’s rights in the country, or Maria Felipa, also part of the independence war against the Portuguese in Bahia in 1822-23. Malês is a reference to the Revolt of the Malês, one of the biggest slave rebellions which occurred in Brazil and was conducted by black people who were still enslaved and also who were The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 86 social struggle as the dimension when/where “we meet” 10. Mangueira, in this sense, performs a mobilization of race, gender, sexuality, and class that is much closer to the framework described above when referring to Ferreira da Silva’s analysis of Bloco do Olodum’. That is, they are able to avoid a redeploying of the racial through the cultural, precisely what the modernistas failed to conduct: while Mangueira centralizes names, bodies, faces, histories, and stories, the modernistas make recourse to the abstractions of the “indigenous”, the “black”, and the “indigenous-black-white woman” to articulate their revolution. What matters here is less an open defense of whitening and more the fact that modernismos’ apology of/for Modernity functions as a complicity to forms of (white) hegemony, which includes silencing race even while one strives to highlight it. More specifically: the modes of being of indigenous populations are not interesting for the modernistas project. Rather, the abstraction of their lives’ of abundance and ócio (something Oswald returns to in his later writings) should be anthropophagized into the social-political–cultural-economic structures of São Paulo 11 . The centrality of the black population for and the extremely complex freed, influenced by Muslims in Bahia in 1835. Several of these explanations can be found in Naíse Domingues’ piece (Domingues). 10 There are almost infinite references throughout the lyrics: Getúlio Vargas (Brazil’s president/dictator between 1930-1945 and 1951-54), the year 1500 when Pedro Álvares Cabral “discovered” the country, the not-seen histories which exist nonetheless (“o avesso do mesmo lugar”/the converse of the same place), smashed retinto blood (that is, black genocide, but which can also be a reference to Macunaíma’s opening lines “No fundo do mato-virgem nasceu Macunaíma, herói de nossa gente. Era preto retinto e filho do medo da noite” – “Deep within pristine woodland, there was born Macunaíma, hero of our people. He was dark black and a son of the Terror of the Night” [my translation].), and more. 11 Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso’s forthcoming work engages precisely with this question: “(...) it would be possible to consider that the positive and utopic evocation that Oswald de Andrade conducts concerning an indigenous pre-Cabral mode of life is precisely based on the conception of an affluent society organized from the abundance of natural resources and valorization of ócio, something hinted at by the first colonial reports of travelers such as Pero Álvares de Cabral, Padre Anchieta, Hans The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 87 participation they had in the construction of Brazil is an element of a certain initiation, and it stops there. The point here is not to call for a doubling down on a “pure” call for a separation of identities into well-defined categories and corners; rather, it is to pinpoint that for all the radicality the modernistas’ work harbors, which isn’t irrelevant, the structural mode of life, of being, of existing the movement strives for continues to carry the residues of a life dictated by the logics of the colonial-racial-capital trio, that is, it remains a project trapped within Europeanness not because it embraces it blindly but because it replies to it to long for a place in its pantheon. There is an obvious breakage with a more conservative-traditional Europeanness to be sure (Oswald, for example, will return time and again to Marxism’s possibilities and failures), but the fundamental fact remains: the modernistas wanted to bring the indigenous and, to a lesser extent, black populations into their modern reality. So far, it is easy to see how Mangueira’s lyrics have very similar themes when compared to Olodum’s song from 1988, especially regarding how struggle is the central dimension where the racial and gendered subaltern of Brazil can assemble to forward their demands. What about the similarities between Mangueira and the modernistas? The similarities between the two projects are much more painful to inhabit, for these challenge certain modes of Brazilian society while maintaining desires which cannot but sustain the modes of being they are attacking. In other words: both deal with miscegenation and difference. There are at least two central and complicated assumptions behind both Staden and Jean de Léry. ‘We already had communism. (...) We had the list and distribution of physical goods, moral goods, and dignified goods’. In this sense, the anthropophagic utopia is constituted as a critique of capitalist productivity and of the ‘salaried slavery’ it imposes. However, by celebrating the indigenous ‘laziness’, anthropophagy also claims all of the technological advances of the industrial modernity (...) As Jurandyr Manfredini states: ‘the return to the natural state (the desired outcome) should be confused with the return to the primitive state (what does not interest us)’. Therefore, anthropophagy rejects the indigenous mode of life as a model for society, thus seeking valuing only a vague notion of simplicity to be concretized, eventually, in the notion of ócio [leisurelaziness-rest-time]” (Cardoso, Políticas Do Primitivismo Na América Latina: Raça, Nação e Utopia Em Amauta e Revista De Antropofagia forthcoming). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 88 artistic endeavors, however, which mark a certain impossibility: 1) neither Mangueira nor the modernistas are willing to relinquish a certain version of the nation and 2) both assume the Brazilian mode of bringing reality into representation (that is, the country of productive differences) as the ultimate dimension to be re-actualized. I am not claiming that both are self-defeating projects. They are generative and challenge dominant structures of power in their own way. Nevertheless, Brazil as a nation of productive differences necessarily signifies indigenous dispossession and genocide and black/brown/mulato exploitation and death, generalized class domination and poverty, and miscegenation (difference) feeds both the whitening ideal and racial democracy. Mangueira’s entire performance coupled with the lyrics is an extremely powerful moment of social contestation, challenge to (the state and capitalism’s) total violence oriented project, re-animating historical facts without claiming history as the privileged space of signification, and centering indigenous, black, and poor lives as whose struggle marks the potential for a different future-present, as the new flag they sewed stated12. Nevertheless, they are still haunted by the country defined as a “cauldron of differences”; the question and goal, then, become how to tend to a ghost which demands 13 12 Brazil’s flag, composed of a green rectangle, yellow lozenge, blue circle, accompanied by white stars representing the states, with the words “order and progress” written in the middle, was substituted by a flag with a pink rectangle, white lozenge, and light-green circle with the words “indigenous, black and poor” in the middle. 13 Refer to Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, wherein she selects haunting as the language to frame her investigation for it allows looking at the structures that, in a sense, ‘hide in plain sight’ in our daily lives (in)forming our social relationships and processes in an entanglement of past-presentfuture. Haunting opens possibilities as it requires “something-to-be-done”, that is, it demands something different from before to go away. What seems central in Avery’s articulation of haunting is that the ghost is just as haunted as the ones it haunts: there is no causal relationship between one event and an-other but only a seemingly (because it is possible to move on from the ghost) permanent interrelatedness of nevertheless distinct appearances/situations/experiences. Haunting, therefore, is the everywhere-everything all around always weighing on social reality-history that presses against, with, and within everyone. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 89 something but whose necessities, even when one tries to care for them, necessarily reinstitutes, over and over, what made it real in the first place. In this sense, it apparently becomes clear that the domain of [Brazilian] representation is too powerful and allencompassing; miscegenation, the country of infinitely infinite mixtures, is seemingly too compelling and mighty for all political and cultural discourse and practice. The relinquishing of the fundamental trait of Brazil’s imagining and (self-)imaging looks as if too dangerous, that is, the trait actualized through its two distinct forms: either in its liberal-authoritarian form which defined the whitening ideal, that is, the disappearance of mulato/black/indigenous populations via the self-productive force fueled by the (white) male desire, or in its liberal-celebratory form that defined racial democracy in which the violence against the mulato/black/indigenous population is denied as such against those groups (that is, they only die in the name of security and development and not because the country functions through [self-] authorized gendered and racialized state violence) and wherein their traces are appropriated into the establishment of the inherently democratic Brazilian subject. When written like this, it becomes difficult to understand precisely why there is so much difficulty in abandoning miscegenation as the mode of being Brazilian. Perhaps there is a desire or hope to point out that these modes are innately contradictory and that they can be re-worked or go through a process of unveiling for Brazilian society to be as it actually is, that is, what lies behind these articulations 14. Despite being a productive strategy – critique and deconstruction are always important –, there lacks an investigation which brings to the fore how indigeneity and blackness, gender and sexuality, class and subjectivity, if they are 14 What matters here is less the denunciations of miscegenation and colonization carried out by black and indigenous movements and thinkers – Ailton Krenak, Márcia Kambeba, Abdias do Nascimento, Djamila Ribeiro, Eliane Potiguar, Lia Minapoty, Conceição do Evaristo, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, David Kopenawa, Felipe Tuxá, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and several others, more or less directly, have pointed out what miscegenation actually means in/for Brazil’s imagination and strive to move away from it frequently. The point is that the letting go of “diversity” in the pursuit for a different mode of signification or, rater, inhabitation, is never on the table: the foundations of the Brazilian nation-imagination-subject linger in the popular imagination. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 90 to exist without the risk of being violated, need to move away from the country’s version of its own modern project. To be clear: this does not require to vacate institutional fights or letting the state up for grabs15; rather, it urges for the abandonment of what made Brazil modern in the first place, that is, the country’s intrinsic difference brought about its capacity to balance antagonisms represented in the figure of the mulato. The country’s claim to modernity, either via the modernistas or the social scientific texts, must be relinquished, even if it sounds counter-intuitive at first (since diversity is a symbol of progressive politics in the early 21st century). As long as it exists, not only self-authorized (white male) violence will continue to be the rule (and everything also signified and actualized by it via the logic of extraction and [dis]possession that mobilizes all bodies against the bodies that occupy lands and spaces that capital desires, feeding the ontoepistemological conditions that brought us to here even more)16; moreover, it will halt any possibility for having a project which isn’t open to falling into the trap of neoliberal multiculturalism/multiracialism; that is, it will be impossible to come up with a project capable of sustaining the total displacement of the modern-colonial project. I’ll leave with this fleeting thought and proposal: one possible way of dealing with the permanent trap that difference conjures for/in the Brazilian, is to stop deploying difference, to stop making it productive because that is the underlying move sustaining the creation of Brazil (as in the sociological tradition most commonly embodied by Freyre and that I’ve discussed elsewhere 17 ), the modernista revolution (through a 15 In Red Skin, White Masks, Glen Coulthard refuses the liberal politics of recognition and also, and this is my argument now, the progressive politics of diversity because it serves the colonial power in our present configuration while still maintaining the necessity “to engage with the state’s legal and political system” (179). 16 The conflicts, genocide, and political-capitalism assassinations for land never stop and continue to grow. See, for example, Giovanna Galvani’s report on the 827% increase in deforestation during the pandemic and the news regarding the assassination of the agro-farmer that denounced a scheme of falsification of documents to acquire land (grilagem). 17 Refer to note 4. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 91 deployment of difference into the spitting out of the Brazilian anthropophagic Subject), and calls for social justice in the early 21st century (as discussed with Mangueira, the country will thrive because of its productive/generative differences – blackness, indigeneity, genders, sexualities, and classes). These categories of difference were precisely created by the colonial project to keep colonization intact. This is the critical interrogation missing and that I want to attempt as this project grows. If even philosophically, abstractly, metaphysically we are not able to relinquish the originating violence that defines the conditions under which segments of the population are made to be forever subaltern, what chances are there of shifting material daily life? The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 92 WORKS CITED “Agricultor que denunciou esquema de grilagem na Operação Faroeste é assassinado em Barreiras, BA.” G1, https://g1.globo.com/ba/bahia/noticia/2021/06/14/agricultor-quedenunciou-esquema-de-grilagem-investigado-pela-operacao-faroeste-e-assassinado-embarreiras-oeste-da-ba.ghtml. Accessed 16 June 2021. Andrade, Mário de. Macunaíma, o Herói Sem Nenhum Caráter. 3a ed, Livraria Martins Editôra, 1962. Azevedo, Ana Beatriz Sampaio Soares de. Antropofagia: palimpsesto selvagem. Universidade de São Paulo, 4 Aug. 2016. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.11606/D.8.2016.tde04082016-165033. Café Filosófico CPFL. Macunaíma e o Enigma Do Herói Às Avessas | José Miguel Wisnik. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_hWIfYna7k&t=926s. Accessed 22 May 2019. Canofre, Fernanda. “Conceição Evaristo: ‘Falar sobre preconceito racial no Brasil é derrubar o mito de democracia racial.’” Sul 21, 3 May 2018, https://www.sul21.com.br/ultimas-noticias/geral/2018/05/conceicao-evaristo-falar-sobrepreconceito-racial-no-brasil-e-derrubar-o-mito-de-democracia-racial/. Cardoso, Rodrigo Octávio. “Colonialidade, Transculturação e Identidade Nacional Na Antropofagia Modernista; Coloniality, Transculturation and National Identity in the Brazilian Modernist Anthropophagy.” Entre Caníbales, no. Año 2, n.o 9, diciembre 2018, 2018. Castro-Klarén, Sara. “A Genealogy for the ‘Manifesto Antropofago,’ or the Struggle between Socrates and the Caraibe.” Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1, no. 2, Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 295–322. Coelho, Fred. A Semana de Cem Anos. 2021. Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Daher, Pedro. Finish the Eulogy, Brazil : A Call for the End of the Subject. University of British Columbia, 2018. open.library.ubc.ca, doi:10.14288/1.0364706. de Andrade, Mário. Pauliceia Desvairada. Accessed 22 May 2019. de Andrade, Oswald. “Manifesto antropófago.” Nuevo Texto Crítico, vol. 12, no. 23–24, 1999, pp. 25–31. Crossref, doi:10.1353/ntc.1999.0017. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 93 de Andrade, Oswald. “Manifesto antropófago e Manifesto da poesia pau.” 1924, 1928, p. 11. de Souza, Paulo Donizetti. “Samba da Mangueira 2019 traz Marielle, Dandara e a história que a história não conta.” Rede Brasil Atual, https://www.redebrasilatual.com.br/entretenimento/samba-da-mangueira-traz-marielle-edandara-e-a-historia-que-a-historia-nao-conta. Accessed 16 May 2019. Domingues, Naíse. “‘Marias, Mahins, Marielles’: saiba quem são as mulheres negras citadas no enredo da Mangueira.” O Globo, 9 Mar. 2019, https://oglobo.globo.com/celina/marias-mahins-marielles-saiba-quem-sao-as-mulheresnegras-citadas-no-enredo-da-mangueira-23505537. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “‘Bahia Pêlo Negro’: Can the Subaltern (Subject of Raciality) Speak?” Ethnicities, vol. 5, no. 3, Sept. 2005, pp. 321–42. SAGE Journals, doi:10.1177/1468796805054959. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a Global Idea of Race. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Galvani, Giovanna. “Desmatamento aumenta 827% em terra indígena no período da pandemia.” CartaCapital, 2 Sept. 2020, https://www.cartacapital.com.br/sustentabilidade/desmatamento-aumenta-827-em-terraindigena-no-periodo-da-pandemia/. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. New University of Minnesota Press ed, University of Minnesota Press, 2008. webcat2.library.ubc.ca Library Catalog, http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780816665006. “História para ninar gente grande.” Wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre, 23 Mar. 2019. Wikipedia, https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hist%C3%B3ria_para_ninar_gente_grande&old id=54575844. Jorge L. Santos. Mário de Andrade e a Construção Da Cultura Brasileira - José Miguel Wisnik. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnJ7yVd7nYA&t=5s. Accessed 22 May 2019. Nascimento, Abdias do. O Genocídio Do Negro Brasileiro: Processo de Um Racismo Mascarado. Editora Paz e Terra, 1978. Nodari, Alexandre. “A Única Lei Do Mundo.” Antropofagia Hoje? Oswald de Andrade Em Cena, edited by João Cezar Castro Rocha and Jorge Ruffinelli, É Realizações, 2011, pp. 455–83. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 94 ---. Políticas Do Primitivismo Na América Latina: Raça, Nação e Utopia Em Amauta e Revista De Antropofagia. Universidade Federal Fluminense, Forthcoming. R. Miranda, Fernanda. Silêncios Prescritos.estudo De Romances De Autoras Negras Brasileiras. Malê, 2019. Skidmore, Thomas E. Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. Oxford University Press, 1974. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Daher 95 QUOTE AS: Pedro Daher. One hundred years of hauting: can the Brazilian relinquish its foundations?. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 69-95 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Souza 96 BRAZILIAN REMEMBRANCE by VAL SOUZA The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Souza 97 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Souza 98 a set of images that rehearse an interpretation of Brazil, imprinted and perpetuating thought picturesque and historic work misleading descriptions full of representation vice caricature unfaithful replica a game of images and symbols reminiscences national allegory modernist manifesto [...] the black mother, profile of the generous wet nurse, always smiling and kind, always feeding and rocking the white child; the maid, a kind of asexual brute force, with an undifferentiated face, in the reified function of household object; and the insinuating mulatto woman, an excessively eroticized body, the object of the white man's “hidden” desires. Sensuality, between the lines, malice, geography and climate, tastes and smell associations body from which the voices of others echo thorough description mirages details Centuries passed before I could speak my own language, and then I could ask you what do you see when you see a black woman? The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Souza 99 Stills from the video-performance Lembrança Brasileira - uma seleção pitoresca de imagens (Val Souza, 2021, 7'37”), comissioned by the Instituto Moreira Salles for the 1922: Modernismos em debate series, held by MAC-USP, Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the IMS, and transmitted on youtube throughout 2021. um conjunto das imagens que ensaiam uma interpretação do Brasil, pensamento impresso e perpetuador obra pitoresca e histórica descrições equivocadas repletas de vício de representação caricatura replica infiel um jogo de imagens e de símbolos reminiscencias alegoria nacional manifesto modernista [...] a mãe preta, perfil da generosa ama-de-leite, sempre sorridente e amável, sempre alimentando e ninando a criança branca; a empregada doméstica, uma espécie de força bruta assexuada, de rosto indiferenciado, The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Souza 100 na função reificada de objeto do lar; e a insinuante mulata, corpo erotizado em excesso, objeto dos desejos "ocultos" do homem branco. sensualidade, entrelinhas, malicia, geografia e clima, gostos e cheiro associações corpo de onde ecoam as vozes dos outros minuciosa descrição detalhes miragens Séculos se passaram até que pudesse falar minha própria língua e então eu pudesse te perguntar o que você enxerga ao ver uma mulher negra? QUOTE AS: Val Souza. Brazilian Remembrance. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 96-100 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 101 AESTHETIC MANIFESTATIONS OF THE NOBODY: EX-VOTOS AND THE BIOMORPHIC FORMS OF SONIA GOMES by LAURA HARRIS …how is it possible that that which should happen to nobody, to 'no human being', has consistently delineated the existence of so many human beings - those whose bodies signify something that seem to escape all that should be comprehended by the Enlightenment notion of humanity, and its ontoepistemological descriptors, namely universality and historicity. - Denise Ferreira da Silva, “No-bodies”. Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them – will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 102 drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them. - Eduardo Galeano, “Nobodies”, The Book of Embraces. The Modern Art Week staged in São Paulo in 1922, which purported to inaugurate modernist art in Brazil, was, as Nita Nunes and Rafael Cardoso among others have noted, primarily an elite, white, Paulista affair. It was inspired, in part, by the incorporation into European art— in cubism or dadaism, for example—of elements of “primitive” aesthetics that Europeans had encountered in the circuits structured by European colonialism and slavery. European artists replicated those encounters and their attendant modes of extraction; and the long The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 103 trajectory of modern European art, stretching from the sixteenth century refinements to the twentieth century refusals of representation, restaged the conditions that framed and defined modernity itself. The Brazilian artists involved in Modern Art Week found themselves ambivalently situated with respect to this primitivism, given their simultaneous proximity to and distance from European subjectivity’s seemingly easy and simultaneous claim on whiteness and universality or, as Denise Ferreira da Silva puts it, “transparency.” Modern Art Week, which coincided with the centennial of Brazilian independence, created an opportunity for those who organized it to define a specifically Brazilian modernism that would resolve that ambivalence, in which uncertainty regarding the personal identity of putatively “white’ Brazilians was bound up with their anxiety regarding the racial character of the Brazilian nation. On the one hand, the capacity of elite, white, predominantly male Brazilians to produce modern selves, modern art, and a modern nation must be compromised when their capacity for self-determination and development, for transparency and universality, had been degraded by close and prolonged contact with supposedly “primitive” indigenous and black people in the brutal, dispossessive, miscegenative and genocidal operations of supposedly “primitive” accumulation. At the same time, these operations were not only essential to the development of modern political economy, theywere a quintessential expression of modernity. If the arts of modernity hold and conceal this truth at the level of content, the arts of modernism flaunt it at the level of its form. For Brazilian artists, Modern Art Week was a chance to embrace this revelation and thereby claim a personal and national racial modernity in which Brazilian whiteness and Brazilian humanity come, together and intertwined, into their own, in a specifically Paulista cosmopolitanism. As Zita Nunes notes, Oswald de Andrade, one of Modern Art Week’s most oft-quoted spokesmen, had already declared in a 1921 article: Our [Brazil’s] racial question is a paulista matter. The rest of the country, if it sticks with us, will move, like a body that obeys, possessed by our way, by our will (...) And this paulista question is a futurist question. No human agglomeration was ever so The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 104 destined for futurism in activity, in industry, in history, in art, as the paulista agglomeration. (28)1 Later, in his 1924 “Manifesto of Pau-Brazil Poetry” (or “Brazil-wood Manifesto”), Andrade gives his readers a sense of the dramatic and vigorous movement of the national body he anticipates in his resounding of the rhythms and obsessions of futurist or modernist selfassertion: As the age is miraculous, laws were born from the dynamic rotation of destructive factors. Synthesis Equilibrium Automotive finish Invention Surprise A new perspective A new scale Whatever natural force in this direction will be good. But there were lingering doubts about the “primal” forces animating modern advance. In the same manifesto, Andrade addresses a concern raised by the Swiss-French writer Blaise Cendrars: “You have the train loaded, ready to leave. A Negro churns the crank of the turntable beneath you. The slightest carelessness and you will leave in the opposite direction to your destination” (185)2. In response to concerns regarding the source of the energy driving the willed forward motion of industrial development, Andrade insists, that this Negro or more broadly, “the rich ethnic formation” this Negro’s presence figures, belongs to the Brazilian 1 I am citing the translation Zita Nunes offers in Cannibal Democracy. Nunes notes that she found the citation in Mário da Silva Brito’s História do modernismo brasileiro: antecedentes do Semana de Arte Moderna (1978). 2 Zita Nunes also calls attention to this passage in Cannibal Democracy (37). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 105 subject emblematized by the “paulista agglomeration.” The “primitive” elements of Brazil are to be incorporated into modernist art through a reassertion of ownership of the land and everything in it. Negros and all that they create are among the natural resources the paulistas claim as their own. Agglomeration updates, intensifies and modernizes accumulation. Ambivalence is overcome when the primitive other, constructed as suitable for dispossession and disavowal, is also understood as proper for consumption. “Carnival in Rio…. Vegetal riches. Ore. Cuisine. Vatapá, gold and dance.” All “ours,” Andrade insists, “barbarous and ours” (184). A specifically Brazilian modernism would then “…encompass the cylinders of mills, electric turbines, factories, questions of foreign exchange, without losing sight of the National Museum,” in which the so-called primitive or non-modernist elements would be preserved while the people linked to them are subject to brutal policing and extermination (187). This is the mode of “synthesis” that will move the laggard national body, and the manifesto’s fast-paced juxtaposition of disconnected and seemingly opposed terms simulates that propulsion. Andrade goes further still in his poetic and performative “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” published in 1928. Veering away from what he had referred to earlier as the “indigestions of erudition,” he adopts anthropophagy, or cannibalism—a key sign, in European writing of the primitivity in and of Brazil—as a metaphorical model for a specifically Brazilian modernism, tied to a specifically Brazilian national identity (187). If Europeans viewed the Brazilian subject as debased due to its intermingling and miscegenation with the so-called primitive, and if cannibalism as imagined in European writing is a key sign of primitivity, then Andrade’s occupation of the position of the cannibal, his proposed cannibal incorporation of the very idea of cannibal incorporation, constitutes his, and Brazil’s, reply. 3 The ideal Andrade announces and performs here (rewriting Brazilian history in this document by dating it “the 374th year of the swallowing of Bishop Sardinha”), suggests another mode of synthesis, a more complete incorporation of everything that is “not mine” — both the 3 The anthropophagy proposed here is Andrade’s own invention. As Denilson Baniwa has argued, indigenous understandings of anthropophagy are quite different. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 106 European “Law of Man” and the “Law of the cannibal”— which would leave no trace behind (44, 38). Andrade’s proposals for Brazilian modernism anticipate and extend the conversations that took place in the context of the Modern Art Week. 4 Again, these conversations occur in the context of the broader intellectual and political discussions about how to secure Brazil’s status as a modern nation, led onward by the Brazilian subject whose will and capacity to determine and stay the forward course depends on the revaluation of the taint of those considered to be its primitive and, as Denise Ferreira da Silva has argued, “affectable” racialized others.5 If completely consumed, everything that is considered primitive becomes nourishing, even invigorating, and those associated with it are absorbed and ultimately disappear. As Nunes and Cardoso have noted, Andrade’s is not the only modernist aesthetic to emerge in Brazil at this time. They point to many other contemporaneous modernist practices, understanding Brazilian modernism to be, as Cardoso puts it, “a diverse and dispersed historical phenomenon.”6 I am interested, however, in another aesthetic practice that is not generally thought of as modernist, or as art, or even as specifically Brazilian. And while it is contemporaneous, it is not strictly so, thereby troubling the timeline that is supposed to allow the charting of the primitive, the modern and the contemporary. I am referring to the practice of making and offering ex-voto objects, particularly the iterations of that practice that seem to be a key focus for Brazilian scholars: those found in Northeastern Brazil. I do not intend here to re-define this practice as Brazilian modernist art. I want to suggest, instead, that this practice constitutes another way of representing and contending with modernity, 4 For a fuller account of these conversations, see Zita Nunes’s Cannibal Democracy and Rafael Cardoso’s Modernity in Black and White. 5 See Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race. 6 Rafael Cardoso, Modernity in Black and White. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 107 with the meeting of different social formations and aesthetic traditions, with the brutal effects of modes of contact still structured by colonialism, slavery, and their afterlives. The European modernist incorporations of “primitivism” that inspired Brazilian modernists restage and, at the same time, renegotiate this contact. While they appear as disruptions, formally speaking, in prevailing forms of representation, most fundamentally Renaissance realism, they work, I would argue, to represent, and in so doing, manage, contain, and perhaps even compensate for the violent social disruptions that modernity produced, often by figuring fragmentation or jarring juxtaposition resolved by various modes of synthesis. The Northeastern ex-voto tries, too, to register and contend with these violent disruptions, but in a very different way. It does so without regard for art as institutionalized in and by imperialist formations in Brazil, though not without regard for aesthetics. More appropriate here would be the term offered by curator Naine Terena who, when presenting indigenous “works” in art contexts where their force cannot quite be registered, prefers to call them “aesthetic manifestations.”7 The ex-voto, promised and offered by those who are suffering and in need of support, in gratitude for the assistance of a saint, has both attracted and frustrated scholars, who have had difficulty interpreting the ex-voto. Among the causes of that difficulty is the fact that the ex-voto cannot be definitively placed, historically or geographically. Its origins are nebulous; it appears in many disparate places at the same time, and across time. It does not seem to belong or to express ideas and values proper to anybody. For art historians it is also “vulgar,” “mediocre,” “unseemly,” and persistently so. It seems, as Georges Didi-Huberman has noted in his study of some of its European iterations, not to significantly transform or evolve, stylistically speaking, resisting placement within usual art historical narratives of progress and improvement. “Their aesthetic mediocrity, their 7 Naine Terena, guest lecture in “Indigenous Arts in the Americas: Old and New Media,” course taught by Natalia Brizuela, Julia Bryan-Wilson and Beth Piatote, at the University of California, Berkeley, March 16, 2022. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 108 formulaic and stereotypical character, sets them apart,” he observes, “from any ‘grand’ history of style” (7). While J. von Schlosser tries to place the ex-voto in a lineage that would arrive, ultimately, at the realist Renaissance portrait, Schlosser’s efforts are frustrated, DidiHuberman argues, by the fact that the older forms don’t disappear. 8 They seem instead to proliferate and accumulate, overwhelming, in some settings, the very Renaissance portraits Schlosser valorizes. Moreover, even when provisionally understood as materially diverse and even motley “portraits” that take the form of a recognizable head and face, the ex-voto can just as easily be given in the deformation of a hand, or a hypertrophic testicle, or even a lump of wax of the same weight as the vow-maker that is shaped and reshaped through contact with the vowmaker and the objects around it. Resemblance, Didi-Huberman notes, might also be established through multiple overlapping forms of representation. If this is portraiture, then what kind is it? The ex-voto, Huberman argues, might best be understood as “a…field in perpetual constitution” that requires alternative heuristics of resemblance and meaning (11). As I have noted, in Brazil the focus has often been on the ex-voto’s appearance in the Northeast, considered, due to its racial demographics, one of the most “primitive” regions of Brazil and, therefore, most threatening in its seeming backwardness, its potential to derail the direction set by the precarious will of the modernist artist and subject of Brazil even as Andrade tries to define him. The ex-voto of Northeast Brazil appears to have been “discovered” inadvertently by Luís Saia, an architect who participated in the Modern Art Week and was later sent by Mario de Andrade and Oneyda Alvarenga on an ethnographic expedition to the area to search for raw folkloric material. 9 Observing similarities between the ex-votos he found there and African sculpture, Saia compared them to the works of European modernism, to cubism in particular, which standard European art history tells us 8 The study Didi-Huberman cites is J. von Schlosser, Histoire du portrait en cire [1911]. 9 Saia’s 1938 expedition, undertaken under the auspices of the Departmento de Cultura da Prefeitura de São Paulo, echoes the one taken in 1924 by several other participants in the Modern Art Week (including both Oswald de Andrade and Mário Andrade) with the Swiss-French poet Blaise Cendrars, to Minas Gerais. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 109 introduced African aesthetics into European art forms and which been a crucial inspiration for Brazilian modernists. 10 What does this comparison suggest? How might we make sense of this modernist’s discovery, of what appears as either another, popular modernism or as a non-modernism that seems nevertheless to resonate with modernist forms and concerns? Later studies take care to reframe the ex-voto of Northeastern Brazil by tracing the geographical and historical trajectory of the form through Portugal to the ancient Greeks and Romans and to the pagan antecedents to Western “Civilization.” They also take great care to differentiate the ex-voto of Northeastern Brazil from these precursors, understanding it less in art historical and more in anthropological terms. What art historians consider to be the vulgarity of the ex-voto, these scholars describe as its simplicity, which they attribute to the “extraclassical,” non-Mediterranean or non-Iberian components of Northeastern Brazilian culture.11 Experts try to detect and parse the “primitivities” of the African and Amerindian traditions that were dislocated there by identifying their specific marks, in a type of forehead, for example, or a style of carving. Such marks, featured in the individuated specimens displayed in exhibitions or catalogs, are often given as the discovery of the astute collector. Or they are given as the discovery of the photographer whose discerning vision is able to draw out what Mário Barata, when describing photographs taken by Mario Cravo Neto, refers to as the ex-voto’s most significant “planes, depressions and saliences” (136). It is this discerning vision of the photographer or the “sociophotographer” whose practice is “imbued with a scientific approach” that the anthropologist Gilberto Freire likens to his own, that is able to illuminate, literally and figuratively, and to “reveal and fix” the ex-voto’s exoticized “primitive” features (129). 12 The precise signs of “pure” Africanity or Amerindianness are elusive, impossible to pinpoint and almost always understood to be 10 As noted in Mário Barata, “The Sculptured Ex-voto in Brazilian Popular Art”. See also Luís Saia’s Escultura popular brasileira, the first published study of the ex-voto in Northeastern Brazil. 11 I am taking the term “extraclassical” from P. M. Bardi’s preface to Exvoto by Mario Cravo Neto. See also Luís Saia’s Escultura popular brasileira). 12 Gilberto Freire’s “Introduction” to Exvoto by Mario Cravo Neto. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 110 rapidly disappearing as they are overtaken by the modes of production and the aesthetics of the modernizing nation. The identification and interpretation are, as Mário Barata notes in his discussion of Saia’s study, not necessarily reasonable or proven, and as others have noted, often a matter of conjecture (132). But what if we decline to treat the ex-voto of Northeastern Brazil as a site in which primitive aesthetics—understood to have infiltrated a fundamentally European or proto-European art form, however lowly—might be filtered, fixed and studied as relic, or raw material to be more deliberately or willfully deployed by Brazilian modernists and absorbed into Brazilian modernist art? And what if we refuse to treat it as another, alternative modernism that restages this absorption on a lower frequency? What if, instead, we understand it as representing the meeting of different social formations and aesthetic traditions through the colonialism and slavery that create the conditions of possibility for such absorption? The exvoto of Northeastern Brazil is non-modernist insofar as it resists and confounds the progressive or developmental historical narratives upon which modern thought relies and insofar as it defies resolution through absorption or any other kind of synthesis while registering, instead, and in many instances, the brutality of this meeting and the marks it leaves behind. The “marks” that capture my attention are wounds. Sometimes explicitly and sometimes more implicitly rendered, these are wounds that the vow-maker has endured. The objects— for example, a torso bearing a large scar, a head and torso with a broken neck, or a detached breast or foot, or a crutch no longer needed—memorialize the wound, keeping it open even if it has been soothed. Why does this offer of thanks for an answered prayer, this testimony to the miracle of survival, seem to demand that these wounds be kept open and on display? 13 Also striking is the way these objects are offered and arranged. The ex-voto, which I have been discussing in the singular form, does not usually appear as such. Rather, it appears 13 I take this understanding of the ex-voto as testimony from Fabiana Lopes de Paula, “Misrecórdia e Triunfo: As dobras de Fé”. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 111 together with others, not in galleries or museums, but in chapels, in sheds adjacent to chapels, or in informally and provisionally sacralized spaces that can be created almost anywhere. They might even appear on the side of the road, at the site of a violent death of someone “very young and innocent or…socially exploited” or upon “the passing of a charismatic figure,” either of which might be unofficially canonized by those who return there as a saint capable of healing. 14 They are arranged, Fatima Bercht notes, in what appear to be messy, haphazard piles, excessive heaps, overflowing bins, “chaotic assemblages,” in a “total disarray” (11-12) not unlike the “rockery” Didi-Huberman describes, that surrounds and seems to overwhelm and overtake the real art, the realist portraits they are supposed to merely prefigure (10). It seems, from these descriptions, that the disorderly jumbles in which ex-votos appear, without names or dates, touching, intertwined, indistinct, also pose difficulties for scholars who generally separate them, treating them as individual works or specimens that they then try to place within the standard interpretive frameworks art history or anthropology have produced and depended on. As I have been arguing, however, ex-votos, especially in the plurality of their form, resists such placement. Can we think of these images as poor images? Poor, not merely because they are associated with poor people, or because they are considered vulgar and unseemly or simple and humble, but in the sense that Hito Steyerl proposes when discussing unidentified bone fragments found in the mass graves of those killed during the Spanish Civil War? Are they, as she puts it, “subaltern and indeterminate object[s], excluded from legitimate discourse, from becoming fact, subject to disavowal, indifference…” that nevertheless record the conditions that brought them into being and, perhaps, vengeful resistance to those conditions and to 14 Fatima Bercht describes in detail one of these unofficial chapels, as well as Saia’s speculation about this phenomenon, in her essay “Miracles: Votive Offerings in Northeastern Brazil”. Lélia Coelho Frota also discusses these and the pilgrimages made to them in her essay “The Ex-Voto of Northeastern Brazil: Its Antecedents and Contemporary Expression”. Both appear in House of Miracles: Votive Sculptures from Northeastern Brazil. Mário Barata discusses Luís Saia’s documentation of this phenomenon in his 1944 book. See Mário Barata, “The Sculptured Ex-voto in Brazilian Popular Art”. See also Luís Saia, Escultura popular brasileira. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 112 those who make and maintain those conditions? Are they then, what Steyerl calls, in her account of poor images, “fossilized diagrams of political and physical violence”? (156) A vow can be a wish, a desire, a prayer that expresses a longing, but a vow can also be a curse. But if ex-votos record and prophesy violence, the chapels in which they are placed are not mass graves. Nor do the ex-votos refer to an image of a whole body, individual or national, from which they have been detached. 15 In these chapels on the side of the road in Northeastern Brazil, in the expansive and ever-expanding assemblages that form there, we find not the fragments that remain of once whole, individual bodies, “now generic, faceless, all mixed up,” as Steyerl describes (151), but displays of the wounds left on no-bodies, on flesh that does not make up any originary or newly synthesized whole. 16 In these sites, where the wounds that proliferate and accumulate are held open, as local versions of the continental open veins Eduardo Galeano describes, the affectability of resources for extraction and consumption is also a reservoir of alternative modes of generativity.17 This generativity is aesthetic and social. It passes from the vow-maker through the saint, through the artisan who might be a friend or neighbor or even the vow-maker herself. It passes through the material, the bits of wood and clay, “vegetal riches and ore,” that elude the Paulista agglomeration’s 15 Nor do they refer to the body Oswald de Andrade invokes when he declares that “the rest of the country, if it sticks with us, will move, like a body that obeys, possessed by our way, by our will…” in “Reforma Literária,” cited above. 16 I am invoking Hortense J. Spillers’s use of this term in the context of slavery and the many studies that use has inspired. See hers “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”. See, for example, page 67, where she writes: “…I would make a distinction…between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the “body”, there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.” 17 See Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 113 grasp. It passes through the offerings amassed in these sites and the alternative kinds of mass that are performed there.18 This generativity also passes through the social circuits in which the kinds of objects or aesthetic manifestations that Sonia Gomes has been making emerge. These aesthetic manifestations (black, feminine and marginal, Gomes reminds us), are layered, multitextured things.19 They are composed from scraps of fabric and other materials: a dress, for example, a T-shirt, a tablecloth, a wedding invitation, a book of fables, or even driftwood carried across the sea. These materials hold memories of their making by various hands (including those who operate the machines at the textile factory in Caetonópolis, where Gomes was born), as well as memories of the occasions they have helped articulate. 20 They bring together castoffs and gifts that are stained, stretched and torn, marked by contact. Gomes works with accumulations of remnants that bear the imprints of all that have held and worn and passed them on. The materials she gathers and arranges are draped, layered, woven, twisted, knotted, bundled, and stitched together. The complex forms that emerge include voids and hidden cavities marked by pointedly exposed seams that resemble the scars that come from what 18 They are, as Lélia Coelho Frota notes, “living works which attest to the capacity for invention, transformation and preservation of shared memories” but living, here is perhaps not fully encapsulated by Van Gennep’s account of the “rite of passage” which Frota uses to explain the pilgrimage that, for her, ultimately defines the ex-voto (rather than the form). 19 Sonia Gomes interviewed by Júlia Rebouças, 19th Edition of the Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc_Video Brasil: Panoramas do Sul, Association Cultural Videobrasil (São Paulo, 2015), exhibition catalog. Cited in Sonia Gomes, “Sonia Gomes,” Artists, Pace Gallery, https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/sonia-gomes/, accessed May 27, 2022. 20 This list includes items mentioned by several different writers, including: Ricardo Sardenberg, “Weaving the Morning” in Sonia Gomes, Sonia Gomes, eds. Isabel Diegues and Julia Barbosa (Rio de Janeiro: Editora de Livros Cobogó, 2018), exhibition catalog; Jill Langlois, “Fabrics with Powerful Stories to Tell,” New York Times, August 28, 2020; and Maximiliano Durón, “Sonia Gomes Creates a Sculpture: The Brazilian artist finds the poetry in fabric and materials she makes her own,” ARTnews (October/November 2021). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 114 physicist Karen Barad calls a “cutting together-apart” of a physical history of sharing against stealing.21 These new forms are biomorphic. Gomes insists on pointing this out because no one seems to notice: I was [from early on] delighted with drawings of internal organs of the human body that I found in science and biology books. The tissues of the body, the vertebrae, the cartilages and muscles, lost me for hours in the colors and textures, do you know that this reflects my work a lot and nobody has said it? It’s a lot about my interior, about a hidden part of the body, the part that we do not see, my work has a lot of this…. I think my relationship with aesthetics also came first from this imagery. 22 These forms are not recognizable, however, as bodies or even body parts. They envision and produce instead new arrangements of flesh that do not forget either the brutality or the tenderness by which it has been touched and thereby cut. The seams—which Gomes learned to sew from her grandmother, who was a healer and a midwife—do not resolve but keep open the question posed by the ex-votos of Northeastern Brazil: why is the healing of the wound bound up with laying it bare? 21 As Gomes says, “My sewing makes a mark. I make sure I leave the seams exposed” (15). See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 22 Sonia Gomes, “Sonia Gomes’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me,” Broadcasts, Blum and Poe, https://www.blumandpoe.com/broadcasts/sonia_gomes, accessed May 27, 2022. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 115 WORKS CITED Barad, Karen. "Meeting the universe halfway." Meeting the universe halfway. Duke University Press, 2007. Barata, Mário. “The Sculptured Ex-voto in Brazilian Popular Art”. Exvoto editor Mario Cravo Neto. Translation Sheila Toogood and Colling McDonnel, Áries Editora, 1986. Barros, Janaina and Wagner Leite Viana, “Haptics as Healing Method for a Politics of Affect”. Sonia Gomes, I Rise: I’m a Black Ocean Leaping and Wide. Editors Patria Kamp, Translation Adriana Francisco. Edition Cantze, 2020. Bercht, Fatima. “Miracles: Votive Offerings in Northeastern Brazil”. House of Miracles: Votive Sculpture from Northeastern Brazil. Editors Marguerita Feitlowitz and Elizabeth Ferrer. Translation Jeffrey S. Ruth. Americas Society, 1989. Cardoso, Rafael. Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890–1945. Cambridge University Press, 2021. de Andrade, Oswald. “Reforma Literária.” Jornal do Comércio, 1921. de Andrade, Oswald. “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry.” Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 14, No. 27, Brazilian Literature, 1986. Translation Stella M. de Sá Rego. de Andrade, Oswald. “Cannibalist Manifesto.” Latin American Literary Review Vol. 19, No. 38, 1991. Translation Leslie Bary de Paula, Fabiana Lopes, “Misrecórdia e Triunfo: As dobras de Fé”. Ex-votos do Brasil: Arte e folkcommunicaçao, editor José Cláudio Alves de Oliveira. Quarteto Editora, 2016. Didi-Huberman, Georges. "Ex-voto: Image, organ, time." L'Esprit Créateur 47.3 (2007): 716. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 116 Ferreira da Silva, Denise. "No-bodies: Law, raciality and violence." Griffith Law Review 18.2 (2009): 212-236. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a global idea of race. Vol. 27. U of Minnesota Press, 2007. Frota, Lélia Coelho. “The Ex-Voto of Northeastern Brazil: Its Antecedents and Contemporary Expression”. House of Miracles: Votive Sculpture from Northeastern Brazil. Editors Marguerita Feitlowitz and Elizabeth Ferrer. Translation Jeffrey S. Ruth. Americas Society, 1989. Galeano, Eduardo, Cedric Belfrage, and Mark Schafer. “Nobodies.” The book of embraces. WW Norton, 1991. Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Translation Cedric Belfrage. Monthly Review Press, 1997 [1973]. Saia, Luís. Escultura popular brasileira. Edições Gaveta, 1944. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”. Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The "American" Connection. (Summer, 1987). pp, 64-81. Steyerl, Hito. “Missing People: Entanglement, Superposition and Exhumation as Sites of Indeterminacy”. The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012. Nunes, Zita. Cannibal democracy: race and representation in the literature of the Americas. U of Minnesota Press, 2008. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Harris 117 QUOTE AS: Laura Harris. Aesthetic Manifestations of the ‘Nobody’: Ex-votos and the biomorphic forms of Sonia Gomes. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 101117 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Denilson Baniwa 118 IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO LEARN HOW TO PLOW THE LAND BY READING BOOKS by DENILSON BANIWA I could speak in my native tongue, I could speak in English, but I chose to speak Portuguese because I am an Indigenous Person, and I am what I consider to be, within my work, a ruin of the territorial colonization called Brazil. I am an indigenous person of the Baniwa people from the Brazilian Amazon. I am an artist and part of a Brazilian native art movement that includes many indigenous persons from the many peoples that exist in Brazil. In the region where I was born there are 23 indigenous peoples and there are over 300 indigenous peoples in Brazil overall, each with their different languages, cultures, traditions, rituals, and societies. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Denilson Baniwa 119 A large part of those societies has been appropriated by many artistic movements in Brazil, modernism being only one of them. Since the arrival of the first European in Brazilian lands, indigenous culture has been extractively become the base of construction not only of Brazilian art but of Brazilian culture. Recently, due to the commemorations of the centennial of the Week of Modern Art and Brazilian modern art, we, indigenous artists, have been making an effort to think about what does the presence of the traditional peoples of this territory within the national discourse mean, whereas our bodies never fitted in it. The talk I bring to you today is called it is impossible to learn how to plow the land by reading books. It is based on a work I did, a Manifesto, a calling, so that indigenous artists in Brazil reclaim their seats and places within the so-called Brazilian Art. Not only of Modern Art, but of Contemporary Art as well. It is impossible to learn how to plow the land by reading books, that is a fact. As far as indigenous understanding goes, as my people understand it, it is impossible to learn how to do anything just in theory. A practice is required and an existence within the complex universe of doing, thinking, and acting. Action only happens when one leaves theory aside and goes on to practice. In 2017, in this place I am speaking from right now, the Goethe Institut in São Paulo, I and 10 other indigenous artists of Brazil have met some of the greatest collectors, gallerists, curators and Museum directors in Brazil to discuss what kind of indigenous presence was necessary in the Brazilian scene then. And what we, indigenous artists, heard from those people, from those great connoisseurs of Brazilian art, was that traditional peoples did not make art. They only made crafts. They made collective art, primitive art, or anything that fits that vocabulary, these synonyms, but never art that could The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Denilson Baniwa 120 be considered art by these academic means of production. So, I and an indigenous relative 1 from the Macuxi people – which is where the story of Macunaíma, written by Mário de Andrade, was stolen from – thought that we should confront those Brazilian Art academics and show them what Contemporary Indigenous Art looked like. As a Baniwa, I don’t have the place of speech, as they say, to talk about Macunaíma, even less to talk about what does Macunaíma mean to the Macuxi people, from whom Mário de Andrade’s story was stolen. But, as a native of the Amazon, I have the place of speech (of the place) where the ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grunberg – a German ethnologist that was in the Amazon region collecting myths, stories, objects and in one of his diaries he collected the myth Macunaíma which, by chance of the time, ended up falling in Mário de Andrade’s hands, and which gave him the chance to write the acclaimed book Macunaíma, a hero with no character, where he mixed indigenous mythology, African mythologies and the mythologies of the Brazilian nation. At the time, Jaider and I had thought about how to present ourselves to the artistic academic society showing two faces. On one hand, the death of the fake Macunaíma written by Mário de Andrade and, on the other hand, the rebirth of the real Macunaíma which was the mythical hero of the Macuxi people. Jaider would performatically rebirth the original Macunaíma and would reclaim the space Macunaíma demands within society, and I would metaphorically assassinate the fake Macunaíma, the one stolen by Mário de Andrade. The painting I’m showing here is that work, which now belongs to the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. That painting 1 Indigenous people in Brazil frequently use the word “parente”, relative, to refer to other indigenous persons, even if they belong to other groups otherwise generally unrelated. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Denilson Baniwa 121 shows the decapitated head of Mário de Andrade merged, mixed, with the head of the actor who interpreted Macunaíma in the film. It is a metaphor that kidnaps both Brazilian Macunaímas, the literary and the cinematic. It is an offering to all indigenous artists in Brazil, where the seasonings used in the anthropophagic cooking are the traditional seasonings of indigenous cuisine. The traditional corn, the cassava, the pepper and the annatto (urucum). Beside the head, the first version of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma book, and, right below, a note, which is the note I leave to all indigenous artists in Brazil. Here is where the thing about the impossibility of plowing the land by reading books comes into play. In the note, one can read in Portuguese: “here lies the simulacrum Macunaíma along with the idea of the Brazilian people and anthropophagy seasoned with Bordeaux and pax mongolica. May from this long digestion Makunaima and the original anthropophagy, which are ours, indigenous people, be reborn.” The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Denilson Baniwa 122 Denilson Baniwa (Barcelos, Amazonas, Brasil, 1984), ReAntropofagia, 2018. acrylic, clay, oil, puçanga and urucum on canvas. The artist's collection, on loan from the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. Photo: @isabella.matheus The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Denilson Baniwa 123 Within the indigenous understanding of anthropophagy, it is impossible that any Brazilian modernist raised in Europe, speaking French and descending from slavers or the Brazilian elite, it is impossible that they understand the complexity of indigenous culture and the complexity of what anthropophagy means to indigenous cultures. The Macuxi people, where Macunaíma came to life, are a traditionally anthropophagous people, even though they have abandoned that practice a long time ago. The Baniwa people, which I belong to, have an ethos, a war ethics, called coada which is nothing less than the kidnapping of the enemy and their anthropophagic consumption. But these codes of anthropophagy in the indigenous world don’t mean the extermination of the other, nor the assimilation of their powers. Anthropophagy, for the Baniwa as well as for the Macuxi, is the annulment of alterity, the annulment of the different other, the annulment of the differences between devourer and devouree, in which all become one. So, how could some modernist artist, raised in French schools or imitating European movements, arrive in Brazil and be able to translate such a complex ethos as that of indigenous anthropophagy? So, as we are in the commemorations of Brazil, all museums here are celebrating the Modern Art Week of 1922. We indigenous artists do not claim any response to modernism nor any response to the Week of 22. Because these answers, critical or celebratory, only make sense The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Denilson Baniwa 124 to an academia that copies European academia. What we, indigenous artists, are trying to do is to bring anthropophagous practice to an artistic sense, that of the contemporaneous, to teach, maybe, to white people in the arts or in academia, how one plants a cassava. One can’t plant cassava, one can’t plant any plant, one can’t grow or sow with state-of-the-art theory. One needs to live the being indigenous. One needs to live in the indigenous community in order not only to understand what anthropophagy means, but a different way to occupy the Brazilian territory, and to be in another retaking of the Brazilian territory, be it through art or through demarcation. And to reclaim Brazilian land we don’t have to claim any criticism or commentary on Brazilian modernism, seen that we, Brazilian indigenous people, make up 0.3% of the Brazilian society and, when the Europeans arrived, we were 100% of that society. It doesn’t fall on us to reclaim any kind of European imitation. What we must do is reclaim our presence. That is what I am doing here, through arguments, even it means to retake kidnapped narratives. Q&A Adriana Johnson: I found your presentation very moving, and I would like to know more about the idea of anthropophagy. You presented the anthropophagic idea as an idea of annulment of alterity. Not to assimilate, but to annul. So, my question is, considering the ruin that is Brazil, still, and your talk, that remains there as a ghost, and thinking about the relation with other indigenous peoples not in Brazil, isn’t there a way to annul Brazil, maybe in imagination? To The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Denilson Baniwa 125 annul it as existing in a certain context? I wanted to know more about that. Isn’t there a kind of imagination where Brazil doesn’t exist, where Brazil can’t be devoured, but annulled, perhaps? I also liked the word “stolen”. That story was “stolen”. I was interested in the relation between stealing and anthropophagy. It’s a very different concept precisely because it preserves the idea of the original: what one steals, what one copies is a simulacrum, it doesn’t carry all the phantasy that is present in the use of anthropophagy as assimilation, of doing something that isn’t one’s own. With the idea of stealing, it becomes apparent that there’s no assimilation, there’s the production of something very different, a second thing that’s not original. So, I’m interested in the usage of this word. Denilson Baniwa: How to annul Brazil, I don’t know. Maybe with the Delorean, the car that travels back in time and to go to 1500 and sink the first caravels that landed here, but no (laughter). There are, within all Brazilian indigenous society, many forms that are nullifying Brazil. Facing all the violence that colonial Brazil built on that territory, indigenous presence-resistance is still a way to annul that history, as history itself, including art, is colonial. However, that, as it happened in 1922, is ignored by Brazilian society because it happens in the margins of what gets to the big cities, whether Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo. Black and indigenous voices were ignored in 1922 as they are today. Even today, indigenous, and black people’s actions have a minimal impact on Brazilian society. Indigenous people annul Brazil all the time in their own way. That annulment is what allows their living presence, with living indigenous The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Denilson Baniwa 126 languages still very present in Brazil, where laws were once created that banned them. Maybe, what indigenous artists are doing today is to amplify these indigenous voices anyway they can. [Regarding the difference between stealing and anthropophagy, in indigenous anthropophagy, as I know it, in the Baniwa people, anthropophagy involves an agreement. Both parts know what is happening and take part in the process. There is a common conscience about anthropophagy, an understanding about what it does, and an agreement between the two. That’s why I say Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma was stolen because it was a unilateral movement. There was no agreement or reciprocity. It was stolen from the Macuxi and taken to São Paulo. Of course, there are other views about it, when jaider says that Makunaima wanted to go to Mário’s book cover, for example. That’s why I began talking about these two views about Macunaíma that we shared, about these two ways to talk about it.] QUOTE AS: Denilson Baniwa. It is impossible to learn how to plow the land by reading books. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 118-126 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 127 ARTUR BISPO DO ROSARIO: IMAGINARY, CULTURAL EXPROPRIATION AND ANTI-BLACK RACISM IN MODERN BRAZIL by SALLOMA SALOMÃO JOVINO DA SILVA Here is the narrative of what was done at the 1904 site. The police blindly and excessively rounded up people they found on the street. They took them to the police stations, then gathered them in the Central Police. There, violently, humiliatingly, they snatched the waistbands of their trousers and shoved them into a large courtyard. When there were a few dozen, they sent them to The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 128 the Cobras island, where they were mercilessly beaten. This is what Alves' terror was; Floriano's was red; Prudente’s, white, and Alves’, colorless, or rather, trunk and cod. - Lima Barreto, Diário íntimo. The main thing in this work of mine from Casa Verde is to study madness in depth, its different degrees, classify its cases, finally discover the cause of the phenomenon and the universal remedy. This is the mystery of my heart. I believe that with this I do a good service to humanity. (...) From all the neighboring towns and villages, crazy people flocked to Casa Verde. They were furious, they were meek, they were monomaniacs, it was the whole family of the disinherited of the spirit. After four months, Casa Verde was a village. The first cubicles were not enough; a gallery of thirty-seven more was ordered to be annexed. Father Lopes confessed that he had not imagined the existence of so many crazy people in the world, and even less the inexplicable of some cases. - Machado de Assis, O alienista. The second time I was in the asylum from December 25, 1919 until February 2, 1920. They treated me well, but the crazy ones, my companions, were dangerous. Also, I meddled a lot with them, which didn't happen that time I was left out. - Lima Barreto, Diário íntimo. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 129 Anti-Black racism in Brazil has repeatedly generated sinister, contradictory, and ongoing stories of real and symbolic violence. These are so assimilated and commonplace that, at times, it becomes difficult for a black intellectual or researcher to choose this or that theme, fact, or event to develop valid public understanding. There is, however, an intriguing fact that is generally known, which suggests to me an effectively revealing unknown, if critically understood, about the modernization of the Brazilian society. It is about the life, work, and post-death prestige of a man of African descent known as Artur Bispo do Rosário. At the global economic level, Brazil went from being an agrarian-monoculture and underdeveloped country in the first half of the 20th century to one of the largest world economies at the beginning of the 21st century. This would not have been possible without a radical technological and productive change. Productive modernity was not accompanied by a reform in collective rights and in the fight against inequalities. The traditional violence applied against black populations and native peoples only modulated and intensified, while racism constituted itself as public policies. This apparently contradictory process can be called reactionary modernity. In Brazil, the deracialization of black historical characters has become part of the dominant culture. Machado de Assis, seen as the father of modern national literature, until very recently was visually interpreted as a white person. This is what some already aged photographs of him at the beginning of the 20th century indicated. However, when images of his youth were located, it was found that some kind of artifice had been applied throughout the 20th century so that he would appear less black than he actually was.1 There are numerous other examples in this regard. Strategies adopted by cultural elites as a way of erasing the marks of anti-black racism itself, transforming the everyday experience of racism into a neurosis of black people. In this case, a kind of popular social psychology has been disseminated, which acts with the a priori culpability of black people for their supposed repression, that is, a primal envy of whiteness. In this argument that wants to 1 See Eduardo de Assis Duarte, Machado de Assis: Afrodescendente, Rio de Janeiro, Malê, 2020. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 130 impose itself against everyday experience, “there is no racism”, but repression of black people. In the case of Bispo do Rosário, however, I remember his image in an Afro diary from the 1990s. A printed booklet, with spaces for personal notes, with images and indications of people, dates and historical events relevant to the black population, which brought some data about the black artist and printed the photographic reproduction of his objects. Since the 1990s, I have come across his creations spread across many articles of black-anti-racist activism and in catalogs of museums and art exhibitions with some ethnic-racial-black connotation. Artur Bispo do Rosário is, since then, projected and seen as a brilliant black man. Recently, in May 2022, Instituto Itaú Cultural produced an exhibition of the artist at its headquarters on the noble Avenida Paulista, in the city of São Paulo, in which there were sculptures, paintings, embroidery, models, miniatures of vessels, clothes and banners and pavilions. Rosário's works refer us to scenic objects or installations that seem to me like those of the Samba Schools, Maracatus Groups, Congadas and other “processions”, pândegos, “embassies” and black “folkloric” processions of “the olden days”. A work by Arthur Bispo do Rosário caught my attention: a set of industrial shoes made of white plastic and blue denim –the “Conga”. I had already noticed it in photographic materials available on the internet, but I could distinguish this montage in the exhibition. The footwear was probably one of the first industrialized forms of a pattern of shoes made of cloth and petroleum-derived material in the country. Alpargatas was the generic name of the textile and footwear industry effectively titled: Sociedade Anonyma Fábrica Brazileira de Alpargatas e Calçados, founded in 1907. This is a story about modernity and modernism in Brazil from the 20th to the 21st century. These shoes were called Conga and I wore them for most of my youth. They were inexpensive, versatile, easy to clean, and relatively durable shoes. Conga is a Central African name, related to the ancient Congo Empire, on the banks of the Kwango River. In Brazil, and The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 131 perhaps in the diaspora, Congo has become a broad ethnical identity. Since my childhood, I heard this name and its derivatives among the elders. Vovó Maria Conga [Grandma Maria Conga] was always present in Umbanda, a Central African religion in Brazil. Conga and Congado are names of traditional popular festivities in the country. In short, there are still many Congos scattered and subsumed in this Black Brazil. In Bispo do Rosário's work, we can observe this journey from African roots to popular culture, to mass industry and the return to the roots by the artist. The central character of this weird story of cultural and economic modernization of a slaveowning tropical society is this black man, born in a small town in the state of Sergipe, Northeast region. Other than that, almost nothing else is said about him. If he had a family, if he had children, if he loved someone. Nothing? However, in all the published materials about Artur Bispo do Rosário a particular adjective is used: crazy. Why? Bispo do Rosário, now deceased, cannot contest this characterization made of his person. For the review of the plot, it is important to say that Senhor Rosário, about whom little has been researched, was born in the state of Sergipe in the first decade of the 20th century. In the 1920s, still a teenager, he already resided in the capital of the Republic, the city of Rio de Janeiro. He would have been a boxer and competed in official boxing matches, when he was injured after being run over by an urban tram in an accident. Received, as if by charity, at the residence of a white lawyer of Italian origin in the same city, he worked as a domestic worker in the mansion of that upper-middle class family. That same lawyer handled his indemnification process with the Canadian company, a public transport service provider. According to the narrative of an official website about his life and work, 2 he suffered a psychotic outbreak and drifted through the city, when he was taken to the traditional Benedictine monastery. From there he was then taken to the Mental Asylum or “psychiatric hospital”, where he was incarcerated until close to death in 1989. 2 Available at http://museubispodorosario.com/arthur-bispo-do-rosario/ Access on July 22, 2022. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 132 There is a cloudy, opaque and suggestively criminal background to the narratives about Rosario's imprisonment that lead me to believe that perhaps he was victimized by usurping godparents. In Brazil, recently, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has frequently acted in favor of the freedom of domestic workers kept in a work regime analogous to slavery. Their “protectors”, as a rule, continue to claim that there is no crime for such an affective tradition of removing people from poverty and incorporating them into the domestic environment, “as if they were part of the family”. 3 Usually with no salary and no benefits provided for in labor laws, which, in turn, have recently suffered with deregulation to increase corporate profitability at the expense of poor and racialized populations. Also, according to a text extracted from the same website, we learned that in 1982 his work was shown to the art consuming public. This audience saw its fifteen banners for the first time in the exhibition called ‘Margem da Vida’, at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro. After the success of his participation, Bispo do Rosário received several invitations to new exhibitions. If there was a pay, someone must have taken the money. I believe that a certain indisputable characterization of Arthur Bispo do Rosário as black and crazy may have been motivated initially because he publicly demonstrated a habit, until then, very common in Brazilian culture of African origin, of talking to spirits and the dead. I also assume that his admission to the psychiatric hospital was managed by his tutors so that they were free to appropriate his retirement in the Navy and the compensation received for the accident suffered in his youth, which weakened him physically and psychologically, perhaps irreversibly, when he had worked as a civil servant of the company responsible for tram transportation in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s. Finally, I believe that such characterization may have seemed important in the construction of his character as a marginalized plastic artist. In this case, the beneficiaries would be the permanent guardians 3 See, for example, https://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/gerais/2022/07/14/interna_gerais,1380220/mulher-eresgatada-apos-32-anos-de-trabalho-analogo-a-escravidao-em-minas.shtml (Access on July 22, 2022) and https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2022/05/13/idosa-e-resgatada-no-rio-apos-72-anos-em-situacaoanaloga-a-escravidao.ghtml Access on July 22, 2022. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 133 of his work, curators and directors of the museum that bears his name, located in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Some studies point to the fact that the imprisonment of socially stigmatized people in asylums has been used by the State and by elite sectors of Brazilian society, in various circumstances, since the mid-19th century.4 The black-mestizo writer Lima Barreto wrote two diaries from his youth until his death. One of them about the impressions that his environment made on him and the other, a long, concise and dramatic account of his admissions in the Mental Asylum. Lima Barreto died at the age of 41, on November 1, 1922 – eight months after the São Paulo Modern Art Week, organized and held, as is well known, at the Municipal Theater of the City of São Paulo. Machado de Assis, considered the father of modern Brazilian literature, distrusted the power of psychiatric medical knowledge and wrote a long story, in which the main character has a firearm surname, Bacamarte [blunderbuss]. In “The Alienist”, Simão Bacamarte, guided by science, enters an imaginary world built by Machado. But psychiatric science intended itself to penetrate the fantasy world of the individual in order to extract him from there and reinsert him in the real world. This turnaround is an absolute inversion of the foundations of the science born with modernity. It seems unlikely that Michel Foucault knew the work of Machado de Assis when writing his History of Madness; however, we are led to think about the work of the French philosopher, who was so interested in the subject and offered us escape routes to reflect on the most varied forms of presentation and exercise of biopower. Following the work of Foucault, the issue of anti-black racism as practice and ideology of biopower has been addressed by Achille 4 See Aguiar, Marcela Peralva. A causalidade biológica da doença mental: uma análise dos discursos eugênicos e higienistas da liga brasileira de higiene mental nos anos de 1920-1930. Revista Mnemosine, Rio de Janeiro, v. 8, n. 1, p. 2-27, 2012. Available at: https://www.epublicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/mnemosine/article/view/41572/pdf_224. Accessed on: Jul 18, 2020. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 134 Mbembe. Mbembe also took advantage of, and extended, Foucault's writings published in Society must be defended. Especially in the pages where he proposes questions about the application of colonial learning and about the conceptual development of the hierarchy of races in an European context, leading to the formulation of the concept of “nechropolitics”. Would it not be possible or probable that the custodian family of Bispo do Rosário, at the time of his admission to the asylum, proceeded in the same manner as those families who adopt impoverished black people and enslaved them, a practice that was even more common in Brazil in the first decades of the 20th century? Did they incarcerate him in order to snatch his compensation and retirement from the tram company, where he had worked for many years, before having an accident and being taken in? Precisely the good family of the lawyer who represented him in the damages suit? Perhaps we will never know the real stories behind these narratives that cover up the two protective instances, that of the rich carioca family and the asylum institution. In raising such questions, I ask myself whether I myself cannot be accused of being insane, interdicted and locked up in some asylum. I say this not as a literary effect, but aware that the current mental health policy, in 2022, is regressing to methods prior to the anti-asylum struggle, which, from the 1980s onwards, began to demand humanized treatment for patients in psychiatric institutions in Brazil. And they made great strides until the new “anti-drug” policy managed to pass amendments to national legislation and set precedents for compulsory admissions of people indicated as drug users, even against their will. We are witnessing a new wave of industrialization of madness. A highly profitable activity for churches and clinics. The second idea that underlies this text is that precisely the emergence of a certain black imaginary arising from specifically African ways of thinking were applied to artistic-creative expressions conceived from the mid-20th century onwards. While, on the one hand, “normal” urban socially subaltern black people consciously sought to escape the stigmas imposed by anti-black racism, on the other hand, “abnormal” black people were free to deal in an artisticcreative way with attitudes, values, and visions of an “archaic” world that the modernity of The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 135 the Brazilian elite wanted to erase, forget or supplant. “The cause of our backwardness” as Raimundo Nina Rodrigues wrote at the end of the 19th century. 5 Psychiatrists have become black people’s most efficient and modern analysts, anthropologists and reformers, occupying important places in intellectual and political leadership. In the unique case of Artur Bispo do Rosário, it would be possible to establish links between his oral and visual discourse as deeply connected to Central African worldviews and cosmogonies, disseminated in religious and creative contents in urban Brazil, something that we can define as black popular cultures. When dealing with African aesthetic continuities in Brazil, Kabenguele Munanga, a Brazilian anthropologist born in Central Africa, noticed and highlighted the following: It is known, for example, that during slavery the coronation ceremonies of the kings of Congo were tolerated and even institutionalized (Rodrigues, 32), but this singularity granted to the Bantu settlers of Congo was only possible within the space of the religious confraternities to which they belonged, such as the Venerable Third Order of the Rosary of Nossa Senhora das Portas do Carmo, São Benedito, etc. However, they could not, within the current colonial and slave holding context, reinvent referred objects, traditionally used in African political institutions of the time. However, there was a very resistant cultural field, in which one can clearly observe the phenomenon of continuity of African cultural elements in Brazil. (Munanga, Arte afro-brasileira, 225) For a long time, Western pictorial art assumed two-dimensionality as the main convention or as a priority form. “Classical” sculptural work generally referred to Greece and Rome, rarely to Egypt or Ethiopia. When the findings of Leo Frobenius and Franz Boas began to be disseminated in the West, there was a kind of seismic shock in visual narratives and some of 5 See Rodrigues, Raimundo Nina. Os africanos no Brasil. 3 edição. São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1957. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 136 the old certainties of the visuality and representational systems of the West collapsed. The so-called avant-garde European artists didn’t take long to feel the tremors on the surface. Munanga emphasizes: This field, much studied by social specialists from various disciplines, is that of religiosity. One should recall that the conversion of black Africans was among the reasons evoked in the 16th century to legitimize and justify slavery. On board the slave ships, there were already chapels where the captives were baptized even before the crossing. When they arrived at their destination in Brazil, they were forbidden to practice their religions. All measures, including police repression, were taken to ensure their conversion to Catholicism. Otherwise, the Catholic religion was considered the only true religion, and those of the enslaved were relegated to the position of mysterious cults or simple superstitions. (Munanga, Arte afro-brasileira, 225) Paradoxically, since the 1980s, the academic environment has been relatively aware of the participation of African descendants in the production of objects of undeniable aesthetic values in the formation of Brazilian society, often linked to their religious practices. Racism, which previously denied the full humanity of black people, has undergone this internal reform, admitting, not without dispute, since the middle of the century, that Africans and their descendants, contrary to predictions, elaborate logical thinking and develop aesthetic feeling. Despite the visible Eurocentrism of the events of the commemoration, the artistic-cultural exhibitions related to the celebrations of 500 years of Iberian expansionism were followed by a vigorous and tense debate on African and Afro-Brazilian arts. Emanuel Araújo, a notorious scholar on this subject, published in 1988 “A Mão negra na Arte Brasileira” which established a kind of milestone for a series of research and reflections on Afro-Brazilian visual arts, previously only treated in a generic manner as “folklore”. However, it was only recently that private and public visual art institutions began to conceive of the physical presence of artists and audiences made up of black people among their The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 137 exhibitors and visitors. Before that, however, a group of young visual artists from the city of São Paulo, including Rosana Paulino, Renata Felinto and Moises Patrício, started a performance movement, which consisted of demarcating the (strange and exogenous) presence of black people in racially hygienist or white-centric spaces. Artists of all languages generally spend a relatively large time of their lives trying to understand and use in their favor the channels of visibility and legitimation paths for their creativity. Visibility that can eventually be translated into monetary value and status. The laws of the art object market obey the rules of mercantile capitalism, but there is a wide field of subjectivities in the definition of accepted or proscribed aesthetic configurations. Modernity, in a way, allowed a flexibilization of conventions around originally European/Eurocentric precepts. Artur Bispo probably attended primary school, that is, the first four years of school literacy, where he probably learned the rudiments of reading and writing that he used in his panels, paintings and industrial fabric embroidery. In these same supports, there are ideograms already identified in the practices of Umbanda in Brazil and Vodou in Haiti. Robert Thompson Farris, 6 traces important links between such graphic signs from Africa to Brazil. One can go a little further and find resonances in the tradition of “rhythmic fabrics” researched by Thompson in the textile prints made by Artur Bispo dos Rosário. My hypothesis is that the imagination of Artur Bispo do Rosário, his maritime imagination, expressed by the predominance of the color blue and the boats seen here as objects of escape from the fixed territory indicate a very specific source in the narratives that emerged in the Christian geography of the ancient Kingdom of Congo. This would also be the origin of his delusional Christianity. Would it be possible to say that, instead of an outbreak, Bispo had entered a trance state from which he extracted these 6 See Thompson, Robert Farris. Face of Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americans. New York: The Museum for African Art, 1993; Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: Afro and AfroAmerican art and phylosophy. New York, Vintage Books, 1954. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 138 “revelations”? Could this be the state that was perceived by the wider society as a deviation from normal behavior not culturally permitted? Dreams, even in Judeo-Christian traditions, play an important role in the dual perception of the world. The physical world co-inhabited by intangible beings called spirits. Could it be that the introduction of the ban on black religious practices, where both the dream and the premonitions have a different meaning, had marked Artur Bispo as someone to be imprisoned? It is the premonitions or revelations that come through dreams that need to be interpreted in the light of Bantu philosophies, I now think. It is important to have a framework on the issues of access to schooling and the systems of reading and writing in the first decades of the 20th century, and the barriers raised by antiblack racism, such as, for example, the subsidized importation of white foreign labor, with privileges as land access and titles and regular jobs. George Reid Andrews, contradicting Florestan Fernandes' thesis on the supposed larval or organic incapacity, or on the inadequacy of black working people to the free labor market, showed how the elite of the São Paulo industrial system built additional barriers to keep black workers out of the factory work, just when it had started to become a primordial part of the social integration system. Although in later times controversies arose over the validity of the scientificity of such inferences based on eugenics, until that time these were irrefutable. Imperial or internal colonialism were Siamese brothers of 19th and early 20th century raciology (scientific racism). In practice, what was at issue were the “racial conflicts”, or fears about the end of white hegemony in different parts of the world and the very survival of the colonialist system, which, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, had reached its peak, especially involving European countries and their colonies on the African and Asian continents. (Souza and Santos, 748) The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 139 Between 1900 and 1950 there was a real boom in public mental asylum institutions in Brazil. Lima Barreto and Artur Bispo do Rosário were black mestizo men, later recognized as geniuses, who were victims of belonging to “degenerate races” and incarcerated in these institutions. It is possible to think that the sociopolitical changes of the “democratic opening” planned by the Military Dictatorship (1964-1985) have created an environment favorable to the viewing of the work of Bispo Rosário. “However, the collective exhibition was the only one he participated in during his lifetime. Bispo did not accept to be separated from his work and did not consider himself an artist. For him, everything was the result of a mission that would one day be revealed on the day of judgment.” 7 Artur Bispo do Rosário. I effectively consider this name to be an enigma involving mass incarceration, psychiatric medical knowledge, public health policies, concepts of art, formation of the consumer market for art objects and cultural circuits. All this is bundled together by the structuring centrality of anti-black racism in Brazil during the 20th century and at that time of the second decade of the third millennium of the Christian era. Anti-Black racism in all geographic quadrants of the colonial world and in post-colonial societies has been exercised with ordinary violence and extraordinary sophistication in the increasingly radical use of technical-scientific knowledge. Based on information on anti-drug policies in Brazil today, it seems possible to support the idea that the biopower of death, contraction, collective humiliation, and massive racial incarceration, exercised by psychiatric medical knowledge throughout the 20th century, is once again being summoned to provide justifications for a new asylum policy, since it had cooled down in the post-democratic opening period, in the 1990s. If psychiatric medical knowledge has been used in Brazil to legitimize the exclusion of the black-mestizo and indigenous population from the modernization process, as shown by the proportional numbers of hospitalizations of racialized people or documents such as Lima 7 https://museubispodorosario.com/arthur-bispo-do-rosario/ The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 140 Barreto's diaries, should we not question how they work in the expropriation and exploitation of symbolic, material and cultural goods created by Afro-indigenous people who, due to the stigma of mentally disabled, become vulnerable to free exploitation by their “protectors”? These misappropriations configured a discontinuous permanence of a cultural system created during the transatlantic traffic and the globalization of slavery as a productive practice. If then it was possible to expropriate someone's life and body within the current morality, that mora has been supplanted, but now it is possible to deprive them of their wisdom. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 141 WORKS CITED Aguiar, Marcela Peralva. A causalidade biológica da doença mental: uma análise dos discursos eugênicos e higienistas da liga brasileira de higiene mental nos anos de 19201930. Revista Mnemosine, Rio de Janeiro, v. 8, n. 1, p. 2-27, 2012. Available on: https://www.epublicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/mnemosine/article/view/41572/pdf_224. Access on July 18, 2020. Andrews, George Reid. Negros e Brancos em São Paulo (1888-1988). São Paulo: Edusc, 1998. Araujo, Emanuel (org.). A Mão Afro-Brasileira. Significado da Contribuição Artística e Histórica. São Paulo: Tenenge, 1988. Duarte, Eduardo de Assis. Machado de Assis: Afrodescendente, Rio de Janeiro, Malê, 2020. Barreto, Lima. O Cemitério dos Vivos. Rio de Janeiro: Planeta, 2004. Fernandes, Florestan. A integração do negro na sociedade de classes. São Paulo: Globo, v. 1 e v. 2, 2008 [1965]. Foucault, Michel. História da Loucura. Tradução de José Teixeira Coelho Neto. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1991. Foucault, Michel. Em defesa da sociedade. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 2005. Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria. O Alienista. São Paulo: FTD, 1994. Edição Escolar. Livro do Professor. Introdução de Aguinaldo José Gonçalves. Mbembe, Achile. Necropolítica: biopoder, soberania, estado de exceção, política da morte. São Paulo, n-1, 2018. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 142 Munanga, Kabengele. Arte afro-brasileira: o que é, afinal? In: Catálogo Mostra do Redescobrimento – Brasil 500 é mais. São Paulo: Associação Brasil 500 anos Artes Virtuais, 2000. Nina Rodrigues, Raymundo. Os Africanos no Brasil. 5. ed. São Paulo, Companhia Editoria Nacional, 1977. Souza, Vanderlei Sebastião de; Santos, Ricardo Ventura. O Congresso Universal de Raças, Londres, 1911: contextos, temas e debates. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas, v. 7, n. 3, p. 745-760, Sep.-Dec. 2012. Thompson, Robert Farris. Face of Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americans. New York: The Museum for African Art, 1993. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: Afro and Afro-American art and philosophy. New York, Vintage Books, 1954. Museu Bispo do Rosário: https://museubispodorosario.com/arthur-bispo-do-rosario/ The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Salomão 143 QUOTE AS: Salloma Salomão Jovino da Silva. Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Imaginary, cultural expropriation and anti-black racism in Modern Brazil. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 127-143 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 144 “BE TUPI”: ANTHROPOPHAGIC CONTRASTS IN ELLEN LIMA’S POETRY by SUENE HONORATO Ellen Lima’s debut book, Ixé ygara returning to ‘y’kûa (I’m a canoe returning to the river’s inlet), published in 2021 by Urutau, brings together 36 poems in which the Tupi and Portuguese languages coexist since the title. On the page following the summary, black background painted with genipap, we read: “Tupi! Be tupi! There’s no questions”. The phrase is in italics, without quotation marks, and has no signature. Epigraph, although not a quote, as usual. Self-epigraph, in fact, that insists on returning throughout the reading of the poems. Ellen, between exclamations, says: “Tupi! Be tupi! There’s no questions”. Suggestion? Advice? Request? Ellen, author of the book and the epigraph, tells anyone that it is necessary The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 145 to be Tupi. Anyone who opens her book is invited – summoned? – to become Tupi. But what does that mean? In the poem “Ybytu” (wind), the poetic voice asks “what would it be like” if we exchanged Portuguese words for Tupi words. The poem collects examples of this exchange and ends like this: “If we call what is beautiful porang, / maybe one day, one morning, / everyone who slept peró, / woke up abá. / And the village becomes Pindorama” (54-55). Abá, in ancient Tupi, can mean person, people, when related to animals, for example; it can also mean man in relation to woman, kunhã; can mean indigenous in relation to the Portuguese, which is peró. The term in ancient Tupi to name the invader takes us back to 1500, when, among others, a certain “Peró” Vaz de Caminha wrote his letter. In the poem, peró is not exactly a “being”, but a way of seeing the world that naturalizes colonization; a past and present mode. If language can transform this way of seeing the world, it can also dream of transforming the world itself: when the taba is Pindorama, no longer Brazil, the name of a commodity, we will be Tupi abás and kunhãs. The invitation, then, is a utopia, a future dreamed of in the present. How would it be? How will it be? Ellen Lima’s autoepigraph erases the famous aphorism from the “Cannibalist Manifesto”, where one can also read a utopia. In “The (Indigenous) Question of the Anthropophagous Manifesto” [A questão (indígena) do Manifesto Antropófago”], Alexandre Nodari and Maria Carolina Amaral (2018) map the reference frame of the aphorism, from Hamlet to the Tupi x Tapuias question in the formation of São Paulo’s identity and the indigenous struggles of that moment. They emphasize, in the reading of the “Manifesto...”, the opposition to the metaphysics of being and the refusal to affirm an essentialized identity, addressed to the romantic paradigm of representation of the indigenous. For Nodari and Amaral, the “Manifesto...” did not launch an identity issue, “but another kind of question, which points to an identity of another kind, which does not concern what we are (or will be) immutably (in a future always postponed), but to what we can and want to transform ourselves into (now)” (2499). The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 146 Ixé yagara… is not only the first book of poems by Ellen Lima. It is the book in which she affirms her belonging to the Wassu 1 and her commitment to her relatives and contemporary indigenous struggles. The verse that gives the book its name suggests that the affirmation of indigenous identity is a process in motion: ixé ygara (I am canoe) returning to ‘y’kûa (inlet of the river). Among expressions in the Tupi language – terms of departure and arrival –, the verb in Portuguese marks the permanence of the movement, in the gerund always avoided by the imposed language. ‘Y’kûa (river inlet), land, territory. Safe haven, since colonizers and neocolonizers hijacked and hijack the affirmation of indigenous identity because it demarcates not the “ownership” of land, but a way of dealing with it. A mode that needs to be interdicted so that progress cements the bones of those who insist on seeing the river as a relative, not as a resource, as states Ailton Krenak (40). Diaspora is the word that Ellen uses to describe this movement back to the territory and affirmation of the Wassu identity when telling her story in the afterword: “[...] in the middle of the way, there was a diaspora”2 (59). A significant part of the indigenous writers and artists working in Brazil today had to deal with the separation of their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents from the territory of origin. Often this is a story of murder in territorial conflicts (genocide) or a story of cultural silencing of their identities (ethnocide). Kaka Werá Jecupé and Eliane Potiguara, for example, were born in large cities after their families were expelled from their territory. Mestra Mayá (Andrade, 2021), in A escola da reconquista (the school of reconquest), talks about the struggle of the Tupinambá in southern Bahia against violence and the seizure of their lands since the beginning of the 20th century. Auritha Tabajara (2018), in Coração na aldeia, pés no mundo (Heart in the village, feet in the world), narrates her search for better living conditions in cities and the prejudice suffered by being a woman, from the northeast, indigenous, and homosexual. It does not seem to me that the “identity issue”, in the books and in the lives of these writers, is related to fixed and immutable essences. The danger of identitarianism – so many voices have already warned 1 Indigenous people who inhabit the State of Alagoas, Brazil. In” (Diaspora in four elements) (Honorato, 2022), I analyze in more detail the configuration of this diasporic identity in the poetic project of the book Ixé ygara…, organized around the four elements of nature. 2 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 147 us3 – has to do with fascist ways of imagining the self, based on a fiction of origin and purity, constantly threatened by the existence of the “other” who, therefore, must be eliminated. Nothing could be further from the claim to indigenous identity in Ellen Lima’s book, as explained in the poem “Portrerritoriality” (“Retraterritorialidade”) (20): Retraterritorialidade Há dias em que me retrato, e nada. Há dias em que o retrato retrata tudo que as lentes não sabem ler. as dores, os amores, as saudades. Às vezes até minhas outras três vidas. Tem dias que o retrato mostra a moça Wassu. E tem dias que o retrato é coberto por ilusões ocidentais. Tem dias que sou, e nada mais. Tem dias que… é só um rosto, vazio e mais nada. Portrerritoriality There are days when I portray myself, and nothing. There are days when the portrait portrays everything that the lens cannot read. the pains, the loves, the longings. Sometimes even my other three lives. There are days when the portrait shows the Wassu girl. And there are days when the portrait is covered by Western illusions. 3 I have in mind books such as Orientalismo (Said, 2007), A identidade cultural na pós-modernidade (Hall, 2006), Entre campos (Gilroy, 2007) and Armadilha da identidade (Haider, 2019), among others. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 148 Some days I am, and nothing else. There are days when… it’s just a face, empty and nothing else. By merging the words portray and territoriality, the poetic voice juxtaposes the collective and personal dimensions: the self-portrait is part of the symbolic demarcation of belonging to the Wassu people. But this self-portrait made of language refuses to reveal anything fixed. In it, what we read is nothingness, the feelings that the lens does not capture, the lives of the same life. Being “and nothing else”, therefore, without adjectives that allow identification, alternate with emptiness. The “western illusions”, which sometimes cover the self-portrait, suggest ways of being indigenous in the contemporary world that are not very predictable in the dynamics of essential discourses. Although Western values are perceived as illusory, they are still present in the way the poetic voice portrays itself. According to Nodari and Amaral, the (indigenous) question of the “Manifesto...” refuses identity essentialisms. The diasporic identity evoked by Ellen Lima and other indigenous writers seems to me to be consistent with this perspective. But while the term Tupi is deliberately avoided by the Anthropophobic movement, “due to the Indianist and nationalist hypostasis through which the word had passed” (Nodari and Amaral, 2480), Ellen Lima not only insists on the term and the language, but also invites - summons? – everyone who reads Ixé yagara… to become Tupi. Perhaps because the frame of reference is different. Ellen is opposed to the Romantics, but also to the Modernists. To think about this opposition to the modernists, I first want to expose conceptions about the Tupi language from the 20th century onwards, before and after the gestation of the “Manifesto...”, and then return to Ellen Lima’s auto-epigraph. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 149 Tupinology in Brazil (c. XX and XXI) In 1928, when Oswald de Andrade published the “Cannibalist Manifesto”, what was this Tupi language? 4 Let’s remember the novel Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma, in which the main character is ridiculed for demanding the officialization of a “truly” national language. The narrator (Barreto, 51, 58) uses three different terms to refer to this language: Tupi, TupiGuarani, and Tupinambá. This quarrel over names - which had barely been stabilized in the 19th century - with the generalization of the term “Tupi” for the language spoken by the indigenous of the coast in 1500 - reaches the XXI century. In 1933, Plínio Ayrosa founded the first chair of “Tupi-Guarani Linguistics” at the University of São Paulo (USP). Frederico Edelweiss, in a text published in 1969, accused the initiative of being hasty because the Tupi language was not yet systematized at that time. Edelweiss proposes the following chronology: the original or ancient Tupi (Brazilian language) is the legitimate indigenous Tupi that was systematized by the Jesuits for catechesis. From the contact between indigenous and non-indigenous people, the general language or Brasiliano emerged from the Tupi; then, with the intensification of contact, the nheengatu, lingua franca, for commerce. Aryon Rodrigues, in an article published in 2010, continued to defend the differentiation between the Tupi languages (spoken in the 16th century between Rio de Janeiro and Pará) and Tupinambá (spoken in the 16th century in São Vicente). The general Amazonian language would have originated from Tupi; from tupinambá, the general In the first year of Revista de Antropofagia, where the “Cannibalist Manifesto” was published, Plínio Salgado wrote two articles proposing that the study of the Tupi language should be done with “human sense” (5), no longer with catechetical purposes, as the Jesuits had done. He says he doesn’t know Tupi well, but he ventures the hypothesis that this language would have originated from onomatopoeia. One of the examples he offers to prove his hypothesis is the following: showing that words with “t” have to do with hard things (itá, stone), he says that cuntã means virgin woman, with cunhã for woman and -atã for “hard, tense thing (the breasts, naturally)” (6). In Eduardo Navarro’s Dictionary of Old Tupi, the etymology of “kunhataĩ” refers to “woman with firm skin” (242). If the adjective “firm” has to do with “atã”, confirming Salgado’s intuition, the reference to the indigenous women’s breasts does not fail to remind of a certain “peró”. Be that as it may, I have never seen Salgado’s articles mentioned in the bibliographies of contemporary tupinologists. But attitudes like his, of inventing etymologies, are heavily criticized as unscientific. Even Navarro himself is accused by Tuffani (2012) of having followed dubious etymologies. 4 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 150 language in São Paulo. Eduardo Navarro, in the introduction of the Modern Method of Old Tupi [Método moderno de tupi antigo], contests this difference. The question of names is not the only “point of discussion” in the field of Tupinology. When I started to study ancient Tupi using the Navarro Method…, I was struck by the insistence on the verb iûká, to kill. 5 For example, to illustrate the uses of the suffix -(s)aba, this sequence of sentences – which I quote in Portuguese – is no less than absurd: “I pass by the place where the Indian is killed”; “The day in which the Indian is killed has not arrived”; “The arrow with which the Indian is killed is long”; “Caiobi, with whom Pedro kills the Indian, is handsome”; “The woman, for whom the Indian is killed, loves him”; “The purpose of killing the Indian is to avenge you”; “I don’t know how to kill the Indian” (Navarro, 279). Reading the Tupinologists who came before Navarro, I have the impression that the hierarchical attitude (which, in the limit, leads to naturalization of genocide) is the rule. For example: Plínio Ayrosa, to justify the comparison that some Jesuits had made between Tupi and Greek, suggests the following: “The language they spoke on the coast was not their creation [...]; it came, like the Indians, from a primitive radiating focus, where the intellectual culture of its inhabitants should be indisputably superior” (24). It seems that this thesis was not carried much further by tupinologists, with the exception perhaps of Luiz Caldas Tibiriçá who, in a book published in 2003 by the Brazilian Creationist Society, defended the Asian origin of the Tupi. To prove it, it offers comparative vocabulary lists. And concludes: “It is not acceptable that, after the publication of this work, some Tupinologists continue to discuss the etymology of an autochthonous Tupi, when its etymology is more than demonstrated to be Asian” (93). Edelweiss also assumes a hierarchical stance when he says that the indigenous people had “uneducated languages” (31), that they had no inclination for effort and lived rudimentarily Lemos Barbosa (1941) questioned the tradition of using “îuká” as a Tupi conjugation paradigm, as it is an irregular verb, but did not comment on the semantic implications of this choice. Érica Zíngano, in the poem “ijuca piranha”, speaks of her surprise in relation to the insistence on the verb îuká in Tupi grammars and relates it to methods used to teach American soldiers “more efficiently and effectively / the language of those / they would kill” (15). 5 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 151 (35). Finally, after commenting on the deterioration of the indigenous language by “Tapuias and mestiços”, who would have “bastardized” Tupi, transformed into Nheengatu (33) – a name he considers a “euphemism” (9) –, he states that: “In a few years, the last dialect will have disappeared with the last Indian, but not without leaving deep and eloquent traces of its precedence imprinted in the language of his successors” (36). And he takes on racist slurs when he says that it is inconceivable, “in a country that maintains exotic and expensive AfroBrazilian Institutes”, that the leaders stop investing in the studies of a language that is “ours” (66). In relation to the indigenous, Edelweiss is strongly attached to the assimilation paradigm. He praises the “civilizing” strategies of the Jesuits and naturalizes the end of the indigenous people. A parenthesis: in 1962 Lévi-Strauss published The Savage Mind, in which this hierarchical assumption is radically questioned. The book is based on several ethnographic studies of different indigenous peoples. Seeking to understand the classifications created by these peoples and how they influence the social structures they live and develop, Lévi-Strauss (31) argues that there are “different modes of scientific thinking”, not stages or phases. In many moments, he criticizes the presumption of superiority of Western science, as, for example, when he says: “Never and nowhere was the ‘savage’ this being just out of the animal condition, given over to the dominion of his needs and instincts that he often liked to imagine, nor was this consciousness dominated by affectivity and plunged into confusion and participation” (57, 59). Anthropophagic Contrasts This quick sketch on Brazilian Tupinology highlights the power of Ellen Lima’s autoepigraph for a reading of the book Ixé ygara… Among the many ways to read it in this context, I highlight three. First: “be tupi” can mark anthropophagy as a possibility of resistance to ethnocide. In the poem “Another Portuguese error” (“Outro erro de português”), The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 152 the poetic voice fictionalizes the erasure of indigenous languages, establishing an opposition to Oswald’s anthropophagy: Outro erro de português Peró chegou e mandou que parasse o nhen, nhen, nhen. A-nhe'eng abé Oro-nhe'eng também, nhen, nhen, nhen, nhen, nhen, nhen, nhen, nhen, nhen. De castigo, cortaram nossa língua no tempo e no espaço. Suspenderam os cafunés e abraços da voz dessa mãe daqui. Mas um dia, ainda cortamos a tua língua e oro-karu com abati (21-22) Another Portuguese Mistake Peró arrived and ordered to stop the nhen, nhen, nhen. A-nhe’eng abé Oro-nhe’eng too, nhen, nhen, nhen, The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 153 nhen, nhen, nhen, nhen, nhen, nhen. As a punishment, they cut our tongue in time and space. The cuddles and hugs were suspended from this mother’s voice. But one day we’ll still cut your tongue and oro-karu com abati In “Portuguese mistake” (“erro de português”), Oswald de Andrade, the poetic voice laments that the Portuguese have dressed the indigenous, instead of the indigenous having undressed the Portuguese (177). This lament opens the possibility of imagining what would have happened if indigenous culture had prevailed over European culture. This “other” error mentioned in Ellen Lima’s poem is not a possibility: it points to the day when “Peró’s” language will be devoured. The repetition of “nhen, nhen, nhen” replaces the association of the expression with the native language, abá nheenga, and endows it with a positive meaning, opposite to the mimimi (complaining) that it evokes in everyday language. The anthropophagic attitude, of eating peró’s tongue with abati (corn), is a possibility for the indigenous people, while in the “Manifesto...” it is only possible for non-indigenous people. Many peoples have been seeking to strengthen or reconstitute their mother tongues; others have adopted languages considered native. Especially in the case of indigenous people in the Northeast, ethnocide took place with such intensity that only the Fulni-ô remained speaking their mother tongue. And the genocide forced many communities to disidentify themselves as indigenous. In Ceará, students of the Kuaba Indigenous Degree are taking Nheengatu classes with an indigenous teacher from São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Amazonas), a city in which this language is among the four official languages (Nheengatu, Tucano, Baniwa, and The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 154 Portuguese). In the municipality of Monsenhor Tabosa, in Ceará, the Tupi-nhengatu language was co-official (Law n. 13, dated May 3, 2021). The Potiguara in Paraíba two decades ago established Tupi (ancient) as the language taught in indigenous schools. Among the Wassu, although there is no institutionalized project for learning Tupi, there is a desire to study it, a process in which Ellen Lima was engaged in and motivated her to write the book. The last poem reads: “From taking so many Tupi words to dance, / from so much dating. / Xe Kûatiara was born” (Lima, 58). The break with the assimilationist paradigm, formalized in the Federal Constitution of 1988, is an achievement of indigenous movements. Territories, languages, rituals, recognition of indigenous identities. In the “Yntroduction” to the theatrical monologue Tybyra, Juão Nyn, Potiguara artist, asks: “Is it possyble to demarcate physycal terrytoryes without demarcatyng the ymagynary ones?” (10). 6 Literature and the revitalization of native or ancestral languages are territories that indigenous people began to occupy in recent decades to demarcate this symbolic space. In Brazil, it is not possible to discuss indigenous identities without thinking about the territorial issue that was established in the 16th century. Second: “be tupi” is opposed to the image of the indigenous fixed to the past, object of discourse. The opposition to this image has to do with the affirmation of indigenous identities in the contemporary world, an identity that is diasporic, non-essentialized. Tupi and Portuguese are mixed in the book, and the records of learning, such as the use of a hyphen, remain as marks of a process. This realization was not possible in 1928. “Tupi or not Tupi” harked back to the past if we consider the dispute over the Tupi or Tapuia affiliation of the Paulistas. And if this quarrel had to do with the contemporary struggle of the Kaingang, in the reading of Nodari and Amaral (2018), the contemporary indigenous presence was still stigmatized in the “Cannibalist Manifesto”. Modernists inherit anthropophagy; it devours the very possibility of affirming indigenous identities. Between romanticism and modernism, the indigenous person remains in the past, represented as dead, an object absent from 6 The use of y in the writing of i is a strategy of symbolic demarcation with which Juão Nyn seeks to re-signify his indigenous identity and evoke a sacred vowel erased by the Portuguese language. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 155 contemporary life, as Carola Saavedra (106) states. Tupi, a dead language, quite dead, even though “Tupi” meant so many things. But I don’t believe that “Be tupi!” indicates the possibility of being Tupi or indigenous, simply by decision. The sentence that “In Brazil everyone is indigenous, except those who are not”, by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2006), is complemented with: “only those who guarantee themselves are indigenous”. Ellen Lima, in my reading, is not inviting her readers to assume an indigenous identity, regardless of “guaranteeing” herself. Only those who guarantee themselves are invited to “indianize” themselves; and, for Viveiros, this guarantee has to do with a non-identity, as it is a collective, relational attribute. But there is something accessible to all: a way of looking at the world, opposed to the ideas of “civilization” and “progress”, which our modern modernists have not refused. And this is the third opposition to which “be tupi” reminds me in the context of Ixé ygara…: the opposition to the idea of modernity. In “A Crisis of Messianic Philosophy”, Oswald de Andrade points to a utopian horizon in which we would all be the “technicized barbarian” of the “Manifesto...”: “And today, when, through technology and social and political progress, we have reached the era in which, in the words of Aristotle, ‘spindles work alone’, man leaves his condition of slave and enters once again the threshold of the Age of Idleness. It is another matriarchy that announces itself” (145). But today we know that savage capitalism profits from the catastrophe of thousands of people without work, without labor rights, pushed towards “uberization”. Spindles working “alone” today have made human and non-human lives expendable. The Age of Idleness has only arrived for half a dozen billionaires. And the Patriarchy was revamped. In Ixé ygara…, the only poem with words in English comments on the destruction of the world by progress, even imagining the possibility of “turning another planet into a product. / And inventing merchandise on Mars” (27). The destruction of the planet is a spectacle that we will record because “now we have the best smartphones / to post the selfies of the end of the world” (28). Shakespeare’s language remains the one that best reflects the globalization of consumption that began with the “discoveries” of the 16th century. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 156 In the online magazine Cemana de 22, Ellen Lima (2022) published “I don’t manifest the modern” erasing Oswald’s “Cannibalist Manifesto” almost line by line. As the title indicates, the opposition to the modernists is explicitly made there. For example: Oswald wrote, “What got in the way of the truth was clothing, the waterproof between the inner world and the outer world. The reaction against the clothed man. American cinema will inform”; Ellen writes, “What tramples on the truth is modernity. Western time fiction. The reaction against modern man. The Free Land Camp will inform”; Oswald wrote “Against Goethe, the mother of the Graccos, and the Court of D. João VI”; Ellen writes “Against the moderns, modernism and modernities in which we were not included” (Lima). Still in this “non-manifest”, another formulation for the “tupi or not tupi”: “Tupi or not tupi there is no question. Oré abaeté” (Lima, 2022). In Tupi, “we” can be denoted by îandé, which includes speakers and listeners, or oré, which designates only speakers. In this new formulation, “be Tupi” is no longer accessible to everyone as a way of being, a verb that does not exist in the Tupi language. Îandé, us-everybody, is opposed to oré, real people, abaeté. It is only Tupi those who guarantee themselves, which does not exclude the fact that there are many ways of “being” and guaranteeing oneself. Many indigenous languages. Many indigenous identities. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 157 WORKS CITED Andrade, Maria Muniz de (Mayá). A escola da reconquista. Teia dos Povos, 2021. Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto Antropófago”. Revista de Antropofagia, ano I, n. 1. 1928. Andrade, Oswald de. “A crise da filosofia messiânica”. A utopia antropofágica. Globo, 2011. Andrade, Oswald de. Poesias Reunidas: Obras completas, vol. VII. Civilização Brasileira, 1978. Ayrosa, Plinio. Primeiras noções de tupi. Cupolo, 1933. Barbosa, A. Lemos. “Juká, o paradigma da conjugação tupí: estudo etimológicogramatical.” Revista Filológica, ano II, n. 12, 1941, pp. 77-84. Barreto, Lima. Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma. Martin Claret, 2001. Edelweiss, Frederico G. Estudos tupis e tupis-guaranis: confrontos e revisões. Livraria Brasiliana Editora, 1969. Gilroy, Paul. Entre campos: nações, culturas e o fascínio da raça. Trad. Celia Maria Marinho de Azevedo et al. Annablume, 2007. Haider, Asad. Armadilha da identidade: raça e classe nos dia de hoje. Trad. Leo Vinicius Liberato. Veneta, 2019. Hall, Stuart. A identidade cultural na pós-modernidade. Trad. Tomaz Tadeu da Silva e Guacira Lopes Louro. DP&A, 2006. Honorato, Suene. “Diáspora em quatro elementos: sobre Ixé ygara voltando pra ‘y’kûá, de Ellen Lima.” Todas as musas, v. 1, ano 14, 2022, pp. 27-41. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 158 Krenak, Ailton. Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. Companhia das Letras, 2019. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. O pensamento selvagem. Trad. Tânia Pellegrini. Papirus, 2012. Lima, Ellen. Ixé ygara voltando pra ‘y’kûá (sou canoa voltando pra enseada do rio). Urutau, 2021. Lima, Ellen. “Não manifesto o moderno”. Cemana de 22, vol. 1, n. 5, 2022. Available at: https://www.cemanade22.com/anteriores/v1-n-5-maio-2022/outros-500/miolo/ellen-lima Navarro, Eduardo de Almeida. Método moderno de tupi antigo: a língua do Brasil dos primeiros séculos. Global, 2005. Navarro, Eduardo de Almeida. Dicionário de tupi antigo: a língua indígena clássica do Brasil. Global, 2013. Nodari, Alexandre and Amaral, Maria Carolina de Almeida. “A questão (indígena) do Manifesto Antropófago.” Revista Direito e Práxis, Rio de Janeiro, vol. 9, n. 4, 2018, pp. 2461-2502. Saavedra, Carola. “Literatura e arte indígena no Brasil.” Veredas: Revista da Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas, n.33, 2020, pp. 102-120. Said, Edward W. Orientalismo: O Oriente como invenção do Ocidente. Trad. Rosaura Eichenberg. Companhia das Letras, 2007. Salgado, Plínio. “A língua tupy.” Revista de Antropofagia, ano 1, n. 1, 1928, pp. 5-6. Tabajara, Auritha. Coração na aldeia, pés no mundo. UK’A Editorial, 2018. Tibiriçá, Luiz Caldas. Estudo comparativo do japonês com línguas ameríndias: evidências de contatos pré-colombianos. Arte & Ciência, 2003. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 159 Tuffani, Eduardo. “Uma tese de tupi antigo I.” Revista Philologus, Rio de Janeiro, Círculo Fluminense de Estudos Filológicos e Linguísticos, ano 18, n. 52, pp. 134-162, jan./abr. 2012. Viveiros De Castro, Eduardo. “No Brasil, todo mundo é índio, exceto quem não é.” PIBSocioambiental, 2006. Zíngano, Érica. “i-juca piranha.” In Memória, Flávia; Almeida, Tarcisio (orgs.). Homo ludens – a brasa e o fanal. Ed. Reticências, 2020, pp. 13-21. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Honorato 160 QUOTE AS: Suene Honorato. “Be Tupi”: Anthropophagic contrasts in Ellen Lima’s poetry. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 144-160 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 161 MAKUNAIMA, MY GRANDPARENT IN ME! by JAIDER ESBELL I happen, artistically speaking, within a process that invites us to critically think decolonization, cultural appropriation, Christianity, monotheism, monoculture and all the dilemmas of the globalized existence. Or isn’t that the case? My emergence comes with the expectation around another term, at least in Brazil: indigenous contemporary art. Not modern art, past and extinct, nor the one to come, but the one belonging to this beginning of the 21st century. First, I’ll mention that I am not alone, I don’t speak alone, I don’t show up alone. I make known that I belong in all visuality, all traces already exposed of my being are merely a step towards more mysteries. We are the well of all mysteries ourselves. I also make known that we are not defined, that we come from a continuous time, without stop. Before that, I make known that we seek the most abstract meanings, we handle other very firm deals in this passage. And even before that, I should say that both my grandparent Makunaima and me, and I am a direct part of them, we are artists of transformation. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 162 We emerge along with art in all the challenges of the great existence and its most evident individual and collective urgencies. We emerge in the apparent chaos, as described among the great Shamans of the world and as an almost consensus in science, in terms of the directions for humanity as such. The mathematical harbinger of the end of the world is also a scene of our apparition. As a product of this time, I understand that colonization was a process, although I understand it is also a continuous act. Thus, I looked all around me and saw my grandparent on the horizon. On the horizon, it is also clear that there won’t be a culture or life – much less a quality life – for anyone if nothing is done. It’s not possible, in case we don’t break some extra membrane of the present, to think about any idea of future in issues of our spiritual connection with the earth and with our garbage. I’ll say that Makunaima isn’t just a strong, manly, macho and virile warrior, far from a possible reality, no sir. They are a dense energy, strong, with their own source, like a banana tree. The initial idea for building this text made me think deeply about the purposes of science in making art an instrument to encourage thought. Seen as I occupy a privileged place of work, I do not shy away from leaving hints and entrances so that all major issues may be contemplated. Do we speak of deconstruction? Gender, sexuality and the extrapolation of worlds will be recurring themes because they are part of life, and everything is the same substance for art. To be free in writing doesn’t mean much when the world needs other viable means to translate itself. Is there such an agency in school education? These are questions that appeal to us. Loans we must make every moment. Loans coming from afar decharacterizing things and energies and let us not want to have the essence of things, for these things are not there for us lest they succeed us. I essay writing to socialize a little the sociable part of my relationship with my grandparent, the one who is not a person, exactly as not to be so. Therefore, Makunaima is my grandparent and gender, form and content have their places of action, as we always say, for they are The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 163 fundamental, but we must go beyond that. Makunaima is beyond and proves it by continually changing. No, they are not a transsexual. Let us dissociate, little by little, Makunaima’s acting-existing from the cognitive effects of gender in our minds. So, does Makunaima appear to me first as a colonized form? I haven’t even presented my grandparent to you, and I am already asking you to go beyond gender, beyond time. That is because we will have to visit another world. I must give this warning as well. I must warn you that these stories are part of my life and that Makunaima truly is my grandparent; that is a fact. Makunaima and many other grandparents come from here, from the northernmost part of the Amazon Forest. We have a history and a geography. We are direct relatives. It’s a biological, genetic, material and substantially spiritual or energetic relation. When I take on and reclaim my bond with Makunaima, I am inviting you to go beyond the debate around colonization or decolonization. When I take that as an argument, I mean to say that it’s a part of me to want that everywhere there is some extrapolation from discourses. When I do it publicly in a strategic place, with art, I believe I am being paradidactic. Because I am an artist and as a person, I use my own revelation, the fruit of my research, in my full life, which is also my research. A meaning for the existence of Pan-Amazonia and its peoples must go through the hands of Makunaima. There is, wherever I take them, a full meaning beyond the factoids of Makunaima’s laziness and lack of character. In fact, I don’t even want to discuss these questions, although they are what brought us to this point. There is a large in between of possibilities of understanding, rather than explanations. Without entering the gates of the indigenous peoples cosmovisions there’s no way to discuss decolonization. If we don’t consider the cultures that have been altered and are currently open to debate with the represented part of humanity, it won’t be possible to discuss any kind of frontier. Even before the notes by Theodor Koch-Grüberg and even in Makunaima’s appearance on a book cover and in film, pathways to decolonization may have been opened. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 164 I believe there is another moment beyond East and West coming together to encapsulate thought. New dimensions are opened when old terms are put in new contexts. The fact is that we live in a state of art and walking through other worlds is just a form of thinking and experiencing this much discussed decolonization. Makunaima and decolonization sound like lost terms in the crowd, that is, the people, those we, media people, seek. Or isn’t that the case? It just happens that Makunaima showed themselves to be part of an available culture. For minimum contextualization, an entire life dedicated to this purpose is announced. We’re going to have a tour around my relationship with my grandparent. Makunaima, in the circles reached by this text, is, or could be known at least for his so far exposed side in the world. As much as some or all of the other fantastic agents colonized along with our people, Makunaima must be removed from the folklore ward. Markedly, Makunaima is involved in the readings proposed by many influential thinkers regarding the dubious character of the Brazilian people. This is also related to the Week of Modern Art of 1922, a century after which we emerge with this additional demand. The present and future of this nation-people of challenging identity, close to the fantastic, is the point from where art makes its propositions. It’s unfortunate that Mário is not here to see and feel these other sides of the movement. But it doesn’t matter because his offspring, I among them, are around. Makunaima always knew what they did, I start from this assumption. They exposed themselves alone and with strategy. Now is another time. The time they thought would come didn’t take even a century. Where I fit, I go. I’ll go beyond my direct relationship with them. As an artist, I also skip colonization and go to a time before all this. I believe and feel that in a certain moment I can be in another time, in a time before our pre-colonial diversities. A total inner vacuum is required from the readers, a nakedness inside to make space. In a larger conception, a total emptying of being is required, so another being can fit. The being is full and brings its own knowledge. The new being won’t stay where it doesn’t fully fit. I repeat, I am not alone, I don’t speak alone, I don’t show up alone. I reaffirm, I belong in all The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 165 visuality, and all clues left of my existence are merely steps toward more mysteries. We are wells of all mysteries ourselves. I emphasize that we are not predefined, we come from a continuous time, without stops. I repeat, we seek the most abstract meanings, we handle other very firm deals in this passage. I will say it again, both my grandparent Makunaima and me, a direct part of them, we are artists of transformation. When my grandparent transforms something into stone, they don’t destroy. And Makunaima comes, on his way back, transforming what they transformed when they first went. They always come in another form. When Makunaima came across a large white rock when walking through the savanna, they didn’t hesitate, they stopped in front of the rock and transformed it into a bull. Makunaima had the powers and the decision to transform the rock, and so they did. When they transformed the rock into a bull and the bull saw Makunaima, it attacked them. Makunaima fought the bull. It was a fierce fight. Finally, the bull came to know Makunaima and begin loving them as its parallel, as a part of itself. They create things with his decisions. Everything they see, everything they touch, receives another kind of action, another kind of energy, something that unleashes a movement in their being and in the being that was touched. As I said, Makunaima doesn’t require a form, a gender, a genesis. They are an energetic state which creates and recreates itself as a banana tree that doesn’t require a partner. It’s the mundane demands of our human senses which require a logical reference. And then Makunaima experiences some form of materiality, of sound, of a sensibility accessible to his descendants, as an idea of gender, for example. They come in many transitory states and start to show beyond orality, beyond myth. They descend from their supreme state arrowed by their pride overcome; then they see themselves beyond pride and after all their essential suffering. They break all barriers, subvert all advice, kiss their grandparent, the tortoise, and go toward the father of us all, the universe. From the universe, Makunaima sees Mother Earth and, from there, they become sad. Makunaima wishes to be there, but the mother beseeches them, and they can’t bear their mother’s love, and they return. They descend to meet their family. They go to the original The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 166 place and see the flower buds. One of these will blossom in great poets. And Makunaima visits each of them to see what they carry. They are full of joy and when they come across my hammock, I pull them by their fingers. They see me. Their eyes shine and absorb me. I made myself into my grandparent, we are now really one. Before that moment, a photograph, and in it my grandparent and I are in constant movement. We are in constant passage and our common origin is unknown to many, but there is the living path we want to get to. I associate in this text in the only way possible. I’m the direct grandson of Makunaima. It’s a family relation, something intimate and sacred, achieved only through respect. So, I am an artist like my grandparent; I’m half like my grandparent. I hold my grandparent’s finger and we go on. With time, I grow and my grandparent Makunaima gets smaller, and we go on until they become a child and I become an old man and the logic of life is inverted and soon something else will be going on. This is our language, a continuous act in itself, transformation. There, before another came, the conjuncture was the one from there. An origin in itself, a resource characteristic of the great act, creativity. We appeared out of nothing, with everything. We brought the origin of the world, and it was to all that we appeared. To appear is a loanword. We now loan everything to disenchant. To disenchant is a transitory state, directly related to the act of destroying what was then associated with my grandparent in their great journey through the world; the lack of character and the disdain for everything. Before one century only, we follow his tracks, always. I am here to rescue my grandparent, to take them home, and to care for them. The being I am, myself, a man, a full-grown warrior of 1.68m, 82kg, 39 years old. Free, as it should be. Free as my grandparent Makunaima when they launched themselves on the cover of Mário de Andrade’s book. They let themselves go, is what they told me in one of our many grandparent-grandchild conversations. So they tell me: My son, I glued myself to that book cover. They say I was kidnapped, that I was harmed, stolen, wronged, betrayed, fooled. They say I was a fool. No! It The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 167 was I who wanted to go to that book cover. It was I who wanted to accompany those men. I wanted to go make our history. There I saw the chances for our eternity. There I saw the chance so that you could be all together here today. Now you are together with all of them and we are indeed a lack of unity. I saw you in the future. I saw it and threw myself in this. I threw myself half asleep, in the trance of the power of decision, the blindness of levelheadedness, of the great passion’s blown out heart. I was in the margin of the margins, I arrived where none of us went before me. I wasn’t there by chance. I was put there to bring us here. It was my grandparent who told me all of this. They don’t keep any secrets from me, and they told me to tell you. It was them who authorized me to quote them, claim them, cultivate them, live them, resuscitate them. My relationship with my grandparent Makunaima is forceful through art and through blood. Yes, we share the same blood, the same wits, the same character. Behold the great artist Makunaima, the great misunderstood being. I was barely born and was raised to my feet with the jump my grandparent jumped to reach me. They told me: “It is really you. You are the one I expected to go with me.” So, they showed me the way. But I was only a child and didn’t really know how big my grandparent were, and they soon took me hanging by their shoulder crossing the first hills. This is what my introduction to the world was like, my grandparent showed me the way. In this life alone, it has been over thirty years of a daily walking in their own origin and trajectory. My grandparent told me that they have tasted the forbidden fruit. They told me that the forbidden fruit is nothing else than courage. They told me the greatest example for our contemporary understanding was throwing themselves on the book cover. When Makunaima decides to throw themselves on the book cover, they knew what they were doing. They didn’t have a choice, their life was happening. Makunaima made the great jump, ate the forbidden fruit whole. When Makunaima decides to expose themselves, they make the The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 168 universe tremble, something really new comes up, something latent urging in the universe. Nothing would be like before; the decision was made. When, coming from another time, Makunaima must show evidence for his universal decisions, they tell us about the cutting down of the great Wazak’á tree. Yes, another great act, instrumental to the pan-origin of all of their children; and their is the decision. They cut down the great tree so all these beings that are spread through the vastness of the green forest could exist today. They cut the tree to give life to the inhabitants of the savanna as well, in this part of the world. There had been hunger, scarcity, when nature showed Makunaima and their siblings the great trees. The great God, which is the greater Nature, through the agouti, showed Makunaima the great tree of all fruits and seeds. No, it wasn’t just one, but symbolically we choose the greatest, the most imposing, the first. The tree of good, upon falling down, brought along the tree of mysteries, the tree of the other beings, the forbidden tree whose trunk still lies today next to the tree of life cut down by Makunaima. And thus, nature brings Makunaima face to face with the great tree. It leaves them there with their neck twisted up and considering the great decision they are about to make. Makunaima stands still, measuring their own existence. Holding their axe, they touch the tree trunk and are electrocuted. It’s a sign for the cutting. They would have the courage. Makunaima delivers the first blows and their siblings, convinced of the following act, aid them in their journey. After a long while, the great tree falls down and the world recreates itself and further transforms itself. The glorious and transgressive act of felling the enchanted tree is only another moment, another decision, a universal act. One hast to slice up time to achieve the least understanding. One must listen to the silence-thinking of Makunaima between their axe blows. It wasn’t mere felling; it was about bringing life to another dimension. In all passages, my grandparent tells me about their jumping into life, this is what is at stake. Being before the possibility and the following act come with the great decision. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 169 When Makunaima decided to be on the book cover, they knew that from then on, their life would acquire a new dimension. They knew the grandiosity of the act of that representation of realities yet to come as extrapolations. They knew of the importance of the icons in the culture that had arrived. They knew those people’s limits and greed. They knew their mission and went. They went into the book, to the movies, they were subjected and delivered to the world. They went out of knowledge, out of lucidity, out of wanting. They knew that being on the book cover was to be in another environment. They knew that, in a world lacking gods and goods, their image would be associated with something not yet lived, but well known. They knew everything, they knew of every step felt to their full realization, which is now. The deification of Makunaima allows them to live yet more vividly the necessary bitterness of the triumph to come. The hero without a character was ready to open their arms wide open to the world and to receive its rain of arrows, its continuous lunges and the projection on the indigenous peoples of all existence. They preserved us by delivering themselves, by making themselves prey to the hunter. My grandparent’s appearance, enchantment, maximum suction and abandonment as a useless trickster apparently comes to an end. Martyrdom, a part of the martyr is felt in Makunaimas life, further wisdom and the absolute pleasure of another kind of love; not for themselves. Makunaima is a being full of courage. They appear humanized. They are considered as a man and partly seen as not having any commitment to life or to love. They are depicted as dry, evil, perverse, possessing the worst qualities, and even as reinforcing the idea of sexism and the patriarchy. And that was precisely what happened when they were raised to the highest visibility, my little grandparent went to meet the thunder, they went to the center of the fire and even drinks tea with Gods and Demons. Makunaima went to be their own journey. Makunaima’s highest exposure severely reflects inwards into the forest the frivolous idea of a curious kind of monotheism. Then came the isms, with Christianity specially. Reflections from all tonalities of existence affect Makunaima which receives them with couterreflections. Makunaima would be the great God, the greatest and the most perverse, for that was the imperative attempt to forcibly extract-impose that identity. That was the twisted The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 170 proposition, which was so celebrated, that failure of feeling which is the face of Brazilian culture. It was a human failure, a shallow, mundane reading. Nowhere could fit what doesn’t have a soul to fit. There is no substance which could fit Makunaima’s deluges in once again deconstructing and building. It is their current function, in Makunaima’s new life, to undo lies. It is Makunaima’s role by the power invested in them to give back. To give back the visions their aura, and super powerful life stolen by enchantment. My grandparent will return everything. They will recover the why of all stories, the simplicity of life. Makunaima will take away from themselves the weary eyes of the world and direct them to nature. Makunaima turns themselves into a warrior of inconformity as only they are and shows the owners of each thing the spirit-soul of each thing. We reenter the same open doors, the open veins in the world of the unknown. More curiosity to summon memory, more movement to go beyond. Another time for new glances. More politics and technology, more magic and shows. We live in a state of art and we accept it. We came from other structures to make ourselves appropriate in this here idea of time. The pathways left by my grandparent open themselves to other walks of life, times of other celebrations. Where he was made useless, that is our destination to go beyond showing new cracks. I must follow them in their revisiting, cross back to where I was reached to learn over. Listen to life in my grandparent’s walking and translate, living as they wish and what they wish, in whichever dimension I end up in. We will be in the tonality of the universe, the color of green forest earth and art in its greatest state of fluidity. All visions are transient, and there is more than one in me. There will never be a conclusion, and my passage is as temporary as these apparent demands and their urgencies. So, recalling essential details is necessary. The fact that we only recently left full orality, a world more of feeling than literal meanings, weighs heavily on this equation. The fact that we live in a permanent state of colonization also poses a factor of obligation, motivating us to be beyond The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 171 things. We walk openly along the great themes of the world, faith, education, culture, gender. And we also believe, because of our strongly spiritual nature, that our art my give us reach. Other reaches such that were very little or very much given to us, and be it so that we can at least actively make up the great diversity forever. Translated by Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso Originally published in Iluminuras, Porto Alegre, v. 19, n. 46, p. 11-39, jan/jul, 2018 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 172 QUOTE AS: Jaider Esbell. Makunaima, my grandparent in me!. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 161-172 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 173 IMAGE, MYTH, ART AND CONTEXTS by JAIDER ESBELL The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 174 Makunaima - I Jaider Esbell, Transformação/Ressurgência de Makunaimî, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 89 x 90 cm. Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art Collection. Photo: Filipe Berndt © Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 175 This work is a part of the My grandparent Makunaima collection, a proposition for a contextual self-curated exhibition on show in Manaus in 2018, the heart of the Amazon. The image suggests an aggregation of scattered elements in the appearance of a figurative idea for the fluid myth. It is fluid because it comes from a state of energy and walks through a time when, in a certain space, men and other beings were also more fluid. Did they merge together? Let’s take notes on these issues for the moment. We speak of a time when everything could be anything. We speak of a time when things changed in shape under different circumstances. Makunaima comes from that time. He comes from a time before that time, actually. The need of a western concrete and masculine human form can very well be the evident effects of colonization. At the same time the image suggests integration and harmony, the excess of foundational elements can also suggest a disaggregation, an expansion, a disintegration. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 176 Makunaima - II Jaider Esbell, Makunaimî Parixara, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 90 cm. Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art Collection. Photo: Marcelo Camacho © Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 177 Makunaima in human aspect. The myth appears to suggest a condition of plenitude. It is possible to see them as a male, imposing being. He looks confident in his now existing figure; he has movement and an eye-catching light. He looks absolute, as if he was the enchantment itself taking form to attend to visualities. This is an important point to mention. In terms of indigenous art, not something exterior, European or framed, we artists lack something dynamic (agency?) so the exact condition of transposing worlds is achieved. We never cease to search for the opposite effect when we simplify the image of the essentially fluid myth to something limited to an image. The limiting sense of seeing oneself as human, mortal, material. The materialization of Makunaima in a framable picture can be a way to produce a complicating factor. This way, who knows, we have the basis or the clues to their devolution to a former state, the state one expects, the full state of art, the state of energy, when the eyes see what is abstract, for that is where all meaning resides. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 178 Makunaima - III Jaider Esbell, Transformação/Ressurgência de Makunaimî, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 89 x 90 cm. Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art Collection. Photo: Filipe Berndt © Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 179 The exercise of deconstructing the nationalized image of Makunaima demands an extra effort and a lot of skill in the construction of the image of our relation. I recall that interpretations beyond our reach hover above my grandparent and me. For many reasons, we shall not feed them because we have a north to guide us. The works in the collection (15 paintings) will never suffice to contemplate that pictorial universe. So, without further ado, we invite our reader to walk without reservations around the world of subjectivity and to wait a little longer. Apparently, Makunaima is something undefined in this picture, although in some of my appearances I have said and written that the image is a part of the art of showing the continuum transitory moment of things. This poetic journey with my grandparent only has oxygen and soil in this environment. A considerable amount of imaginative creativity is required. Just as the image is undone, we expect its decoding effect to decant in our mind and that the other is enchanted in continuity. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 180 Makunaima - IV Jaider Esbell, A luta do boi com Makunaimî, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 89 x 90 cm. Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art Collection. Photo: Filipe Berndt. © Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 181 It’s not my goal to measure my grandparent’s greatness or their smallness in my lifetime. It’s not our study-life’s goal to confront the liberated energy from previous exhibitions. The image above tends to bring the reader to a lesser known side of Makunaima’s activities, their strategic visions. Were them a visionary? Should I ask that question in the past tense of the verb to be? Almost instantly, people who see that image believe it to be the headless mule. A character of the national folklore, the headless mule is directly connected to Christianity. They say the headless mule appears when a priest and a woman fornicate in a church. Not here. There are no mules here. This is a kind of bovine cattle. The same cattle that invade the Amazon forest, destroying everything these days. The same bovine cattle that, before this colonizing wave, didn’t exist around here. Makunaima, in one of their passages, creates an ox from a white rock in a field. Makunaima created an ox before this colony was established. What might that mean? The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 182 Makunaima - V Jaider Esbell, Makunaímî deitado na rede universal, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 89 x 90 cm. Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art Collection. Photo: Filipe Berndt © Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 183 Makunaima is merely an Indian to many, and here they sleep on a hammock in a nonexisting place. For others, they are just a literary invention, something not used anymore and therefore unnecessary. We suppose the words Makunaima or Makunaíma are still entirely new to plenty of people. So, we distribute our efforts on two fronts. The part that hears or reads about the myth of Makunaima for the first time are the direct objects of our agency. In choosing these lines of action, another agency is required, contextualization. Just as some resist the word decolonization, the word Indian appears to be displaced in its use through a consensus between the parts that represent the indigenous movement or movements. Laziness and the unproductivity attributed to the Indian – or better the indigenous person – has its negative effect reinforced by the ignorance of the bare minimum of the status quo regarding the being born, living and working in the forest. Do I speak of prejudice, preconceptions? The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 184 Makunaima - VI Jaider Esbell, Untitled, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 90 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Jaider Esbell © Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 185 Makunaima is now a hummingbird, there. That is how they present themselves. At this point exactly, I am filled with great enthusiasm. The instant readiness of Makunaima in transforming things and transmuting themselves is the most fantastic side of their doings, and thus the least understood. Transformation, the change of states and, as I said before, gender issues, are also perfectly plausible to find in the meanders of the fluid and unpredictable transit I partially find myself in right now. In the text, we find a few relevant points that must be treated with greater resources in our conjoined exhibition to come. The official publication of this essay in a journal as well as the exhibition of Makunaima my grandparent in a colonial showroom in an Amazonian Metropolis are facts. This text has the same context; occupying diverse spaces with what is new or hasn’t been adequately put to use in the first curious and well-intentioned attempts about my grandparent Makunaima’s unusual universe by previous researchers. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 186 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 187 Makunaima - VII Jaider Esbell, Untitled, 2018. Acrylic on paper, 29,7 x 42 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Jaider Esbell © Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art Is there always a party taking place in the indigenous universe? That is what Makunaima has shown, and therefore they were deemed naturally vulgar, disrespectful, and inconsequential? Maybe the joy of indigenous people, the idea of happiness that the outside world so desires, is one of the adverse causes for frivolous impositions. Joy is plenty, the abundant or subtle clothing that makes them unique, could be why they are threatened. In this legend, I attempt to see Makunaima’s image also in the secular and daily abductions that never seem to yield. Such questions are due in this context. Here one can invoke the testimony-fact and give back the exoticism to those who still mix up those of the land. All references applied in the reading and making of Makunaima to the great public beyond the forest are exotic. In nearly a century of maximum exposition, what can one still talk about my grandparent? Everything not yet said, I hold. It was never said, precisely because there was nothing to say. Did the people really need a hero? It was funnier to see make them a villain to sell them for a higher price considering the type’s list of offenses. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 188 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 189 Makunaima - VIII Jaider Esbell, Untitled, 2018. Acrylic on paper, 29,7 x 42 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Jaider Esbell © Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art Makunaima’s general lines should sometimes unalign Makunaim to compose with many others Makunaimî (as the Makuxi write it). The substantial details of this agency are in publishing this text as an invitation-provocation as a direct grandchild of the entity. It would be a risk if we were, in fact, pleading understanding. It would be risky to endure the misunderstanding of something so intimate and private as family relations are. But that isn’t all we are talking about. It isn’t about the search for something comforting and encouraging. We are also not talking about (in)justice or reparation, seen as in art there is generally no space for rights and wrongs, pretty or aesthetically unqualified. Let it be known the greatness of our well-being in living such protagonism. It’s not about some audacious attempt to rewrite history. It’s not even about anything related to the strategic use of media or scoops of originality. There’s nothing to do with using and being used. The meaning is in finding a fertile path so that the dead side of the myth comes to life as something testimonial and not the way it was done before. We go unaligned step by step until this is shown in its fullness. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 190 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 191 Makunaima - IX Jaider Esbell, Untitled, 2018. Acrylic on paper, 29,7 x 42 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Jaider Esbell © Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art There is no logical sequence of events for something as fluid as Makunaima’s existence. In fact, there’s no way to pin a biography or historiography on them. In this work, at least two other characters show up that are equivalent to the famous myth. The perception of characters in art can look like a random composition if there is no context. In this sense, taking part in this genetic lineage, I expand my exposition to the universe at the same time I seek to position myself externally to this moment. This is an exercise I am doing. The crucial moment of the felling of the great Wazak’á tree could say a lot if we allow it to be said. I recall something I said before about the loose ends of conducting wires, so I don’t actually have to reach any conclusion. The idea of a monotheist deity is related to the isolation of Makunaima, the character Makunaima, in relation to Anink’ê and Insikiran, their inseparable siblings, in the book cover. The felling of the great tree is symbolic for reasons not yet shown or seen. With the gain, that in that decision-act a following act makes us think with great comfort about a projection of life on its own limitations to another dimension. The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 192 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 193 Makunaima - X Jaider Esbell, Untitled, 2018. Acrylic on paper, 29,7 x 42 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Jaider Esbell © Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art A child suckling on a bare chest is how Makunaima appears in some scenes. In other moments they appear strong and violent. All these appearances invite us to think about the extremities of what is impossible, out of any reasonable logic in the normal world. How can someone or something so strong and powerful like Makunaima let themselves appear so weak and vulnerable as a tiny baby? These questions seem so nonsense as the claiming of direct relationship I perform and make formally known. So, there you have it, the most instigating component in Makunaima’s deeds and tasks. How can it happen that way? Taking on disparities is not a problem for them. The problem, if there is any, could be, as I said, in the actual exotic being, the outsider, the western, the uncanny. As I have mentioned, the composition of this text in a scientific article is a way to attend to specific demands of the contemporary indigenous art based on a greater agency in approaching all the issues directly or indirectly related to Brazil’s contemporary scene. Does this breakthrough break anything? The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911 Esbell 194 Translated by Rodrigo Octávio Cardoso Originally published in Iluminuras, Porto Alegre, v. 19, n. 46, p. 11-39, jan/jul, 2018 QUOTE AS: Jaider Esbell. Image, Myth, Art and Contexts. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.2. June 2023. p. 173-194 The Living Commons Collective Magazine, n.2, June 2023 undercommons.org ISSN 2992-9911