Escritas antropofágicas na América latina: releituras da história pela ficção

Abstract

At the turn to the 20th century, a series of literary movements took place, which resulted in an alteration of the dogmas of literary writing and in the concept of literature itself. One of these movements was the Brazilian Modernism whose great exponents were Oswald de Andrade and Mario de Andrade, the former with Manifesto Pau-Brasil (1924) and Manifesto Antropófago (1928), and the latter with Macunaíma (1928). These productions permitted the embodiment of what was intended as the “anthropophagic process” of Brazilian culture, and for that, they employed the metaphor of the autochthonous cannibal. Based on this metaphorical image, we approached several productions made by the European chroniclers who had their first encounters and impressions on this figure and custom. Thus, by examining the conceptions developed by the chroniclers such as Christopher Columbus (1492-1493), Hans Staden (1557), Theodore de Bry (1590), Gabriel Soares de Sousa (1587), José de Anchieta (1563), Hernán Cortés (1866), among others, we bring a compendium of the representation of the autochthonous cannibal figure in the Latin-American space (in the context of the discovery of America and the first contacts between civilizations), which is explored and reconfigured in literature in the three works that will be analyzed, namely: El entenado (1983), by the Argentinean Juan José Saer; Terra Papagalli (1997), by the Brazilians José Roberto Torero and Marcus Autelius Pimenta, both works being models of the new Latin-American historic novel; and Meu querido canibal (2000), by the Brazilian Antonio Torres, constituting a historiographic metafiction. In these works, there are various perspectives on how to portray the cultural manifestation of the cannibalistic ritual, as well as the meaning effects produced from this ritual. We also examined the ways in which such cultural practice is approached by the writers who produce their discourse from an enunciative locus of the hybrid, interracial, syncretic and transcultural Latin America. From this analysis, we aim to highlight that, due to the theoretical process that resulted from this awareness – with emphasis the Brazilian modernist movement as a great exponent –, Latin America developed a theoretical-critical framework and a literary production based on cultural anthropophagy – from which resulted the Latin-American historical novel – that support the local literary production, giving voice and opportunity to those who were colonized and had their discourse marginalized by the canon guidelines.