The Dream (Film)

This chapter begins with a scene from the 2001 film Hannibal, where the recitation of Dante’s first poem from the Vita nuova plays a crucial part in elaborating the main character’s cannibalism, and a passage from Luciano Berio and Edoardo Sanguineri’s polyphonic setting of Dante’s dream in their musical work Laborintus II. Arguing that these popular adaptations bring into focus Dante’s distinctive mixing of horror and humor, this chapter uses the cannibalist theme to understand Dante’s relationship with his first friend Guido Cavalcanti. Drawing on the idea of cultural cannibalism developed in the Brazilian Antropófago movement, which was itself deeply informed by Dante, the chapter explores the significance of Dante’s relationship with Cavalcanti by exploring the different ways scribes and editors have presented their poems on the page. This inquiry also addresses larger transformations of Dante’s book such as the tendency to reduce it to its poetic components alone following the model of Petrarch.

THE MUSEUM BRAZIL: CULTURAL CANNIBALISM AS AN ANSWER TO THE PREDICAMENTS OF A SHAKESPEAREAN CULTURE

Shakespearean cultures are the ones whose self-definition heavily relies on the determination of a foreigner’s gaze, their self-perception originates in the gaze of an Other. Thus, in such circumstance, the centrality of the other demands the prominence of the mimetic impulse in the shaping of national identity, which cannot but evoke a paradoxical constellation, based upon a constant oscillation between the own and the foreigner.

Eating Murasaki Shikibu

The fifth-century transmission of China’s sophisticated writing system to Japan prompted a cascade of textual and literary developments on the archipelago. Retrofit to support Japanese phonetics and syntax, a hybrid script and literature evolved; from this negotiation of texts emerged Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji in eleventh century Kyoto. While Genji is celebrated today as Japan’s enduring national classic, it fell out of print for much of two centuries preceding its first translation into Victorian era English. This paper examines how interregional exchanges of translations and scripts have amplified the critical and popular success of Genji. It will be argued that English translations of Genji helped to provide a stylistic and typographic model for reintroducing the text to modern Japanese readers as a mass-market novel. In theorizing about such matters, the Japanese concept of reverse-importation will be introduced and intercultural transferences are contextualized within Oswald de Andrade’s notion of cultural cannibalism.

Anthropophagy in São Paulo's Cold War

The first biennial founded outside Venice opened in São Paulo Brazil in 1951, providing a fulcrum between “dependency” and “developmentalism” (to use economic terms). In terms of art history, it presents a useful anomaly in which an international style (“concrete abstraction,” a European import) was used simultaneously to eradicate local difference and to declare a cosmopolitan, up-to-date Brasilidade (Brazilianness). More crucially, I argue that the São Paulo Bienal was the precondition for the newly rigorous conceptualism that followed, as Brazilian artists in the late ′60s rejected “Concretismo” to craft a new world picture, radically transforming margin and center through the profoundly theoretical practice of antropofagia — cultural cannibalism.