New perspectives on post-colonial theory: On History and Knowledge in Brazilian Literary Studies

In this comparative cultural-historical research project, the process of literary theory formation in the Brazilian post-colonial context in the 20th and 21st centuries will be examined from an interdisciplinary perspective. The aim is to attempt a new perspective on the context previously dominated by approaches of post-colonial studies, in particular by means of a first-time interpretation of the works of Antonio Candido (1918-2017) and Roberto Schwarz (Vienna, 1938), whose fragmentary reception in the German-speaking world represents a striking gap in the research about Brazil. Decolonisation was not a uniform worldwide process, but was marked by complex historical contexts, which only a consistently historiographical approach can adequately elaborate. Candido and Schwarz have developed a critical method that allows the conditions of production, circulation and reception of Brazilian literature to be explained in a way that is not yet sufficiently widespread in the German-speaking context. Drawing on the German-language philological tradition (Curtius, Auerbach) and critical theory (Benjamin, Szondi, Adorno), the two protagonists have made this productive in the Brazilian context. In this sense, they distance themselves from the paradigm, dominant since the 1960s, of viewing literature through the lenses of either French theory or Anglophone post-colonial studies. The aim of Candido and Schwarz’s theory and practice is to develop a literary approach that opposes the view that literature is an aesthetic expression of “Brazilianism”, an identity that was supposedly always there but was suppressed by the colonizers. Instead, Candido and Schwarz consider literature to be a form of knowledge that allows the recognition of reality in its comprehensive aspects. In order to shed light on this connection between literature, history and society, the study of literary form is to be understood as a mediated instance. This project examines the debate of “Brazilianism” by using the category of anthropophagy as an instance. According to Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928), the metaphor of anthropophagy was spread as the central paradigm of a supposed “Brazilianism”. From the 1960s and 1970s it gained further significance and attracted international attention under the influence of the French Theory. Anthropophagy was then appropriated by post-colonial studies and equated with categories such as “hybridity”. However, the sharp criticism of the concept of anthropophagy and the resulting debates in Brazil have hardly been noticed outside the country. This project will reconstruct this debate in detail since its beginning, using the method of constellation research, in order to make clear, for example, the role of Mário de Andrade and his anti-nationalist criticism.