Anthropophagic utopia and dialectics of non-contemporaneity in Oswald de Andrade

Abstract

This essay aims to describe the general aspects of what one may call “Oswald de Andrade’s utopia”. Such utopia is built by means of an allegorization of the juxtaposition between modernity and pre-modernity, which in Andrade’s view figures as Brazil’s particular path towards an original and superior form of civilization. This way of civilization could benefit from a legacy from the past and from the achievements of modern society, and skip the steps of bourgeois development. Moving on, the essay makes a comparative study with similar Marxist reflections, namely: Marx’s interventions around 1870-1880 on the question of Russian communal property and Ernst Bloch’s reflections on the “dialectics of the non-contemporaneity”. The aim of such comparison is to show the close relation between Oswald de Andrade’s utopia and other socialist authors that developed ideas about heterogenous paths towards a post-bourgeois future, setting up a critical perspective around the development of capitalist forms of production as a necessary condition of the new social form.