| This dissertation presents the theory and practice of a cannibal logic as the sign of an other thinking in Latin America. Following the argument of an essay by the Brazilian poet and critic Haroldo de Campos, which discusses the relations between Latin American and European art and culture in terms of both "dialogue" and "difference," it departs from the premise that a significant part of the imaginary of the Americas throughout the history of modernity as coloniality has been marked by the emblematic figure of the cannibal and the rhetorical trope of cannibalism as a discourse of otherness. As such, it explores the cannibalization of the cannibal and/or cannibalism in Brazilian modernismo and the formulation of a post-modernist "anthropophagic reason" by the "new barbarians" that would herald the emergence of an other (neo) avant-garde under development in Latin America. It thereby considers the evolution of both a "new poetry," which would seek to deconstruct Eurocentrism, and a "new cinema," which would aim to decolonize the Third World, as productions of a "new civilization" and as illustrations of a revolutionary (cultural) cannibalism that is ultimately contextualized in post-modern and post-colonial theory and criticism. |
