Cannibal Modernity: Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago (1928)
Perhaps a more revealing aspect of the Manifesto was the claim that: “Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.” This statement conferred a local imprimatur on a vision that applied, and perhaps still applies, in Europe and North America of far-off Brazil as a kind of natural and human paradise, a place not only abundant, tropical, and permissive, but also one where race has become unimportant — a fantasy, of course, but one worth holding on to. In the same year a