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In Brazilian cultural life, the year 1922 is a landmark. On one hand, it marked a full century of independence from Portuguese oppression. On the other hand, it marks Brazilian modernism's rise with the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), which celebrates its 100th anniversary in February 2022. The festive movement, filled with painting, poetry, music, and performances is considered pivotal to “awake Brazil from a state of stagnation” (Bopp 1977, 37). The Week was the trigger for new aesthetics that would permeate most of the artistic manifestations of future Brazil. In poetry, Mário de Andrade, Ronald de Carvalho and Guilherme de Almeida stood out. Literary criticism was brought about by Oswald de Andrade, Graça Aranha, and Menotti del Picchia. Regarding music, Vila Lobos had conducted the orchestra. Anita Malfatti's expressionism and Di Cavalcanti's art nouveau shocked the conservative elite, as it did Victor Brecheret's sculptures.

The movement, which sought to turn São Paulo into a new Paris, was financed by the “cream of the coffee oligarchy” (Gonçalves, 2012, p. 30), which, in order not to displease the conservative elite in the audience, it had Guiomar Novaes playing Debussy's solos on the piano. Although Brazilian modernists sought to break with European aesthetic colonialism, paradoxically, they were the adapted version of Italian futurist rebelliousness, Tristan Tzara's Dadaism, Picasso's Cubism, and the nascent French Surrealism. They lacked a genuinely Brazilian allegory to embody the national aesthetic revolution. Artistic authenticity surfaced in the following years with the publication of the Manifesto da Poesia Pau Brasil (1924), and the Manifesto Antropófago (1928), both by Oswad de Andrade and Macunaíma: O herói sem nenhum caráter, a Mário de Andrade’s novel.

It was in a restaurant, whose specialty was frog cooking, that Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral and other friends started their first conversations about Anthropophagy. In good spirits, they recollected Hans Staden's book and Montaigne's essays. The German mercenary's bestseller tells the story of the two occasions when he was in Brazil. The first was in 1547 and then in 1550, when he was captured by the Tupinambá indigenous people and witnessed the details of the mythical cannibal banquet. Anthropophagy became the strong trope to describe the modernist movement: devouring the enemy to absorb their qualities. In the words of Jáuregui (2012, 22),

…anthropophagy has become an obligatory genealogical foundation for contemporary academic debates on hybridity and postcolonialism. However, anthropophagy was not an academic movement, a theory of identity formation through consumption, or a social emancipation program. It was a heterogeneous and often contradictory aesthetic venture.

…anthropophagy has become an obligatory genealogical foundation for contemporary academic debates on hybridity and postcolonialism. However, anthropophagy was not an academic movement, a theory of identity formation through consumption, or a social emancipation program. It was a heterogeneous and often contradictory aesthetic venture.

While in France, Picasso found in African aesthetic a pivotal element for his Cubist transgression, for Brazilian modernists encountered the touchstone at home. Sarcastically, they transformed anthropophagy from a taboo into a totem (Abdenur 2019). Thus, the purpose of this article is not to celebrate 1922 but to critically serve as a two-fold revisit. In the first moment, I have attempted to problematize primitivism incorporation by Brazilian modernism. I argue that, in addition to the important discussion about the cultural appropriation of elements of indigenous populations, it was the impossibility of indigenous self-representation due to elitist, racial and colonial issues that shaped the Brazilian avant-garde in the 1920s. Then, I aim to demonstrate how contemporary indigenous art is devouring, digesting, and regurgitating new ways of critical art in Brazil.

Decolonial theory, colonial habits? Ambiguities of Brazilian modernism

Recently, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in an interview given to Adèle Van Reeth, in the program Les Chemins de la philosophie, on France Culture radio, declared: “Oswald produced, perhaps, the first decolonial theory, to use a fashionable term, the first consistent decolonial theory made in Brazil, perhaps even in Latin America, the most original, the most original contribution”. I tend to agree with that statement, but it also opens up a new avenue for thinking critically about colonial remnants from that era. In the Manifesto Antropófago, Oswald clearly reveals the desire to destroy the established order, standing against the colonial system that never allowed Brazil to become truly independent. “We want the Caraíba Revolution. Greater than the French Revolution”

Oswald repeatedly invokes a mythical past of a pre-Columbian Brazil, inhabited by indigenous peoples who lived in Caraíba Brazil before the European invasion (Cardoso 2020). In this centenary of 1922, it is time to reconsider anthropophagy in a more critical vein. In February 1922, there are numerous debates on this topic, but this time the indigenous peoples represent themselves. Universities, museums, and various cultural institutions are revisiting the legacy of Modern Art Week. One of these events is Mekukradjá - círculo de saberes which held several online debates on the role of indigenous peoples in 1922. Naine Terena, indigenous activist and curator of the event, mediated a roundtable that had the suggestive title: “I've been here all the time, but you haven't seen”.

This sentence leads us to a reflection that needs to be better elaborated: If in theory, anthropophagy was successful for the Brazilian intellectual elite to digest European artistic colonialism, in practice no indigenous people were invited to the........

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