*Manifesto Antropófago* by Oswald de Andrade (1928) — The Public Domain Review
Perhaps a more revealing aspect of the Manifesto was the claim that: “Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil discovered happiness.” This statement lent a local imprimatur to a vision that prevailed in Europe and North America, and perhaps still holds true, of faraway Brazil as some kind of natural and human paradise, a place not only bountiful, tropical, and indulgent, but also a place where race has become unimportant—a fantasy, of course, but one worth clinging to. The same year as Oswald’s ManifestoIn 1928 Mário de Andrade published a novel, Macunaimawhich also drew inspiration from the group’s expedition. It’s a riotous origin myth for his country that rivals that of Virginia Woolf Orlandowhich was published a few months later in its games with gender fluidity, and adds its own episodes of racial slippage for good measure, presenting an ideal of a multiracial Brazil where indigenous people, those of African descent from enslaved people, and those with colonial European blood could be equal. Mário’s story also played on the idea of Brazil as a once-and-future Arcadia, even if his vision of racial harmony was at best naive, and at worst selfish and colonial in its own way, as two of these three groups were historically alien to the country.
