Revista Hispánica Moderna

Abstract:

In this article, I provide a new reading of Andrade's cannibal that charts its subversive avatars in Brazilian concrete poetry from the 1960s to the present. Shifting the terms of the discussion on the legacy of anthropophagia through a reading of Andrade's poetry, I argue that the critical force of his cannibalistic poetics lies not in identity but in its self-reflexive, multimedial defiance of representational logic. Second, I investigate how the Brazilian concrete poets resuscitate Andrade's poetics to take what they famously called "the participatory leap" into politics during the 1960s. Drawing from a diverse array of multimedial, "anti-literary" poems, I illustrate how the largely misunderstood participatory leap hinges on the ways in which the Brazilian concrete poets "devour the non-poetic" so as to renovate poetry in a public sphere in crisis. I conclude by elucidating the continuity of the anthropophagic preoccupation in concrete poetry as an untimely matter of counter-constructing the present with a reading of Augusto de Campos's iconic poem, "Mercado" (2002).