2 - Mário de Andrade's Antropofagia and Macunaíma as Anti-Imperial Scene of Writing

Summary

As in the case of Oswald de Andrade, in the work of Mário de Andrade produced during his ‘anthropophagic period,’ one finds a sustained aesthetic project in which the experience of colonialism emerges in different pieces and fragments. In the work of Mário de Andrade, the experience of Empire is rendered in the plural, particularly as a multiplicity of subject-positions that form postcoloniality. In his body of work, moreover, one finds these polyphonic experiences of colonialism translated into an unspecific ontological place from which to articulate the postcolony. In his famous modernist novel from 1928, Macunaíma: Um Herói Sem Nenhum Caracter, the titular character – ‘herói de nossa gente’ [‘hero of our people'] (9) – embodies the collision between the colonially historicized past and Mário's industrial present.

Although many scholars and even Mário de Andrade himself would later question the location of his novel within the Antropofagia archive, it nonetheless shares the tenets of the cannibalist movement – namely the consumption, rethinking, and underlining of gaps of imperial meaning. In a cogent defense of reading Macunaíma as a contribution to Antropofagia and as an embodiment of its aesthetic and political goals, Zita Nunes argues that:

The novel enacts cannibalism on: 1) a textual level by incorporating other texts through plagiarism; 2) a linguistic level by incorporating other languages into Portuguese; 3) a thematic level through cannibalistic activities of its characters; and 4) on a formal level by incorporating various genres into the novel, producing what Mário called a ‘rapsódia’ (rhapsody), an improvisational composition having no fixed form. (41)

Drawing on and further exploring the critical potentials of these aspects of Macunaíma, what follows will expand on Antropofagia's engagement with Empire while also discussing its limitations and ultimate shortcomings, through the gaze of Mário de Andrade.

Macunaíma: Allegorical Movement through Time and Space

As Albert Braz reminds us, Macunaíma is not entirely Mário de Andrade's creation, but firstly an Amerindian mythological character. Moreover, de Andrade seemingly (re)constructs Macunaíma, at the beginning of the novel at least, as the intersection of different subaltern experiences within Brazilian colonial history, intertwining Amerindian indigeneity with blackness, and not without problematic signifiers of otherness.