They have devoured everything: primitivism, barbarism and the avant-gardes

Abstract

Primi­tivism is a crucial feature of Brazilian moder­nism and it has in Oswald de Andrade’s work one of its major expressions. The “pau brasil poetry” and “anthropophagy” resorted primi­tivism to, as Oswald de Andrade said, set the hands of Brazilian literature to the time of uni­versal literature. The idea was to overcome the felling of delay and the necessity of a national identity; anthropophagy was a metaphor for a culture that was characterized by the persis­tent absorption and transmutation of foreign models. The aim of this paper is to explore the meanings and ambiguities that primitivism has assumed in some of the best moments of Oswald de Andrade’s modernism also in dia­logue with its presence in the European avant-gardes.