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).
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 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 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 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 cultural-artistic 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 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 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)
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.
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 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 capital-racial-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. 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 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” (Nodari). 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]” (Nodari). 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” (Nodari). 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” (Nodari). 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 (Nodari).
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 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” (Nodari). 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 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. In-between 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 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’” (331). 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:
[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]. 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 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 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 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 stated[12]. 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] something but whose necessities, even when one tries to care for them, necessarily re-institutes, 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 all-encompassing; 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 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 grabs[15]; 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 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?
[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).
[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 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.
[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).
[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 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).
[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 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.
[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 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 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 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 [leisure-laziness-rest-time]” (Octávio Cardoso, Políticas Do Primitivismo Na América Latina: Raça, Nação e Utopia Em Amauta e Revista De Antropofagia forthcoming).
[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-present-future. 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.
[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.
[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.
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