Event Highlights: Devouring of Tradition as a Creative Practice in Brazilian Art and Culture | Latin American Studies

Event Highlights: Devouring of Tradition as a Creative Practice in Brazilian Art and Culture

This talk – “Só a antropofagia nos une” – by Carolina Rodrigues Freitas took place on Friday, April 29, 2022. Carolina is a Ph.D. Researcher at the University of Brasília and a Visiting Researcher at Boston University’s Center for Latin American Studies.

Carolina’s research investigates the potential of Oswald de Andrade’s modernist concept of “antropofagia” for interpreting Brazilian culture. She analyzes how “antropofagia” has been thought and practiced in Brazil by a large range of cultural expressions since the colonial period until nowadays, passing through the modernism of the 1920s to arrive at the recent proposal of “re-antropofagia” (2018) by Indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa. Her work investigates these cultural expressions in the light of “antropofagia” (as elaborated by De Andrade and resumed by authors such as Haroldo de Campos and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro) in a comparative analysis of their European and Indigenous matrices, to arrive at a better understanding of Brazilian culture itself.

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