Saudades: toward a sociopoetics of diaspora, migration, & exiled writing

Saudades: rumo a uma sociopoética da diáspora, migração e escrita no exílio

Abstract

Unpacking the term saudades, this article weaves together Claude Lévi-Strauss's research in Brazil for Tristes Tropiques with both Oswald de Andrade's 1928 Manifesto Antropofágico, and Rose and Bob Brown's visual poetry, travel guides, cookbooks, and young adult history books about Brazil. One can consider these projects as decolonial theory, poetry, and sociopoetics seventy or eighty years before decolonial theory became a widely discussed term. Augusto de Campos of the Noigandres group and a leader of the International Concrete Poetry movement wrote introductions to facsimile editions of both Oswald de Andrade's manifesto and then later to Bob Brown's republished collection of visual poems, 1450-1950. Although almost completely unknown now, Rose herself authored three children’s books, Two Children of Brazil, Two Children and their Jungle Zoo, and Amazon Adventures of Two Children, one social geography, Land and People of Brazil, and one biographical history, American Emperor: Dom Pedro II of Brazil, all while living in Brazil. Rose and Bob together edited the Brazilian American business weekly in the early and mid-1920s. All of these people may have known each other in Brazil as they worked and lived among overlapping circles of friends and colleagues involved in the modernist avant-garde, but as-of-yet, whether they met or not remains a mystery.

Keywords:
Decolonial; Visual-poetry; Saudades; Diasporic; Avant-garde

Resumo

Desdobrando o termo saudades, este artigo entrelaça a pesquisa que Claude Lévi-Strauss fez no Brasil para Tristes Tropiques com o Manifesto Antropofágico de Oswald de Andrade, de 1928, e com a poesia visual, os guias de viagem, os livros de receitas e os livros de história para jovens adultos sobre o Brasil de Rose e Bob Brown. Pode-se considerar esses projetos como teoria decolonial, poesia e sociopoética setenta ou oitenta anos antes de a teoria decolonial se tornar um termo amplamente discutido. Augusto de Campos, do grupo Noigandres, um dos líderes do movimento da Poesia Concreta Internacional, escreveu introduções para edições fac-símile do manifesto de Oswald de Andrade e, mais tarde, para a coleção republicada de poemas visuais de Bob Brown, 1450-1950. Embora quase completamente desconhecida atualmente, Rose é autora de três livros infantis, Two Children of Brazil, Two Children and their Jungle Zoo e Amazon Adventures of Two Children, um livro de geografia social, Land and People of Brazil, e um de história biográfica, American Emperor: Dom Pedro II do Brasil, todos escritos enquanto morava no Brasil. Rose e Bob editaram juntos o Brazilian American Business Weekly no início e em meados da década de 1920. Todas essas pessoas podem ter se conhecido no Brasil, pois trabalharam e viveram em círculos de amigos e colegas envolvidos na vanguarda modernista, mas, até o momento, o fato de terem se conhecido ou não permanece um mistério.

Palavras-chave:
Decolonialidade; Poesia visual; Saudades; Diásporico; Vanguarda

Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs. Et voici que je m'apprête à raconter mes expéditions.

-- Claude Lévi-Strauss, the opening lines of Tristes Tropiques ¹

Filhos do sol, mãe dos viventes. Encontrados e amados ferozmente, com toda a hipocrisia da saudade, pelos imigrados, pelos traficados e pelos turistas. No país da cobra grande.

-- Oswald de Andrade, from Manifesto Anthropofago [ Cannibalism Manifesto] (1928) ²

As readers of Revista Gragoatá know, Brazilians often call the effort to assuage an indefinable longing matar saudades-literally, to kill the longings. It is also the name of a sweet treat that reminds many of childhood. In their cookbook on South American cuisine from 1939, the cookbook writers Cora, Rose, and Bob Brown include the following recipe:

Saudades ( Brazilian Longings)
Lightly beat 5 egg yolks with 1 cup sugar and knead in enough sifted polvilho [cassava starch or tapioca flour] to mold into small balls.
Place these on an oiled board and bake until dry in a cool oven
( BROWN; BROWN; BROWN, 1939, p. 345).

They explained, “Saudades is a word often heard in Brazil. It covers a whole lot of emotions, all the way from homesickness to a vague longing for sweets like these” ( BROWN; BROWN; BROWN, 1939, p. 345). The name is now associated with many types of desserts, like Pastel de Nata cream tart, or a variation on Doce de leite, and sometimes any bitter-sweet dessert like a fruit crumble, and with a restaurant's name in Versailles, France, and a bakery in Adelaide, Australia. It now connotes a commercialized saccharine notion of homesickness. Similar to terms describing emotions and affect like love, hate, and trauma, saudade is a floating signifier attached to migrants, immigrants, and refugees as the avant-garde of the general population similar to Hannah Arendt's description of the plight of the European Jews in the 1930s and 40s as “Refugees expelled from one country to the next represent the avant-garde of their people” ( ARENDT, 1978, p. 67). Although even in the 1940s, the use of the word was already becoming a cliché of tourists rather than refugees. It gives a taste of the Browns’ own expatriation that began with Bob and Rose Brown having lived in Brazil on and off since 1919 before visiting, years later, the Amazon region and publishing the Amazing Amazon ( BROWN; BROWN 1942). Their story, lush and overgrown even within these few years, reads like an epic novel: one cannot believe the scope of their interests, accomplishments, and travel, nor the sheer volume of their writings. As a novel, it might have the title, The Amazing Adventures of the Browns. Their story of nomadic adventures, sometimes as exiled refugees, circled around their homesickness for their life in Brazil. Rose (1883-1952) published five single-authored books on Brazil in the early 1940s including three children’s books, Two Children of Brazil, Two Children and their Jungle Zoo, and Amazon Adventures of Two Children, one social geography, Land and People of Brazil, and one biographical history, American Emperor: Dom Pedro II of Brazil. Rose, already a cookbook writer by 1900, and well known as the “belle of the Liberal Club” in Greenwich Village, was an important figure among the Village vanguard ( CHURCHILL, 1959, p. 62). She also lived in the artist colony of Grantwood Village where she befriended Man Ray and many of the Imagist poets and emerging avant-garde artists including Marcel Duchamp who visited ( SAPER, 2016, p. 98). If Rose placed her two stepchildren as “of Brazil,” then Bob turned his life in Rio and São Paulo into poetic raw material to explore a different perspective on anthropology.

Bob Brown (1886-1959), who published with his full name, Robert Carlton Brown, until the late 1920s, was, until the last decade, known mostly among a growing group of Modernism scholars like Craig Dworkin or Michael North and experimental poets, especially including those associated with the Brazilian Noigandres group, the leaders of the International Concrete Poetry movement, including Augusto and Haroldo de Campos. Brown started writing in the early years of the 20^th century first for popular magazines, then bestselling novelizations and serialized movie treatments of those magazine stories, and only later starting in the late 1920s producing and publishing avant-garde and experimental art machines; in the 1930s and 40s, with Rose and Cora Brown, his wife and mother respectively, he wrote cookbooks and a travel guide about the Amazon. He had begun his diasporic adventures in writing more than 20 years before he published six volumes of visual and experimental poetry in the late 1920s and early 30s as an expatriate friend of Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and other avant-garde publishers, poets, and artists ( SAPER, 2016). He became an eminence grise of experimental and Beat poets in the 1950s; he wrote reminiscences for the newspaper-format poetry journal Berkeley: A Journal of Modern Culture that led to recognition by other experimental poetry groups like the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and the republication of 1450-1950, a collection of visual poems, by Jonathan Williams' Jargon Society Press edition of 1450-1950 ( BROWN, 1959) led to Brown being discovered as a precursor of concrete and visual poetry of the 1960s, and to the book of visual poems being republished in a Brazilian edition, edited with an introduction by Augusto de Campos ( CAMPOS, 1989).

In 1917, threatened with deportation for their anti-war political work for The Masses magazine Bob and Rose fled first to Mexico City, and then on trains and boats through Colombia, Venezuela, around to Argentina, where they stayed for six months or so, and then into Uruguay, and finally across the border to build a new life in Brazil. During their years in Brazil, Bob might have met with Lévi-Strauss in Rio or São Paulo; although there is only a small chance, they did work in similar circles. Besides Amazing Amazon with Rose, Bob also wrote articles for Esquire, Inter-American and other magazines. He had planned other books to be titled Return to Rio, and another Homes From Home and Bob also proposed a half dozen Hollywood movie treatments based in and about Brazil. When they felt homesick it was for those homes in Brazil not for a suburb of Chicago where Bob Brown was born and lived as a child and young adult nor for the Greenwich Village bohemia where Rose and Bob lived and worked in their 20s. Brazil and the feeling of a sadness for a lost Brazil is a trope in the writings of Lévi-Strauss, Oswald de Andrade, and the Browns. The concept of saudade only happens with the increase of migration, and as a historian of homesickness in the United States, Susan J. Matt, explains, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “[t]here was a trauma associated with migration, a trauma” ( MATT, 2011, p. 11) in which “the condition turned fatal” unless addressed. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Matt notes that “the modern attitude toward homesickness [is] an attitude predicated on the belief that movement is natural and unproblematic and ... those who suffer from homesickness are considered immature and maladjusted. To feel pain at migration and to discuss it openly is, as one psychologist noted, “'taboo'” ( MATT, 2011, p. 11; VINGERHOETS, 2005, p. 1). Besides the taboo on yearning for a past home, the consumer market warps it “only if mythologized or waxworked as nostalgia, when it can be used to sell something” ( POTTS, 2014, p. 216). John Potts connects that marketable past and consumerist yearning to a type of homesickness in the etymology from "the Greek nostos -- 'homecoming' and algos -- pain or ache; the condition was initially known as mal du Suisse or Swiss illness” ( POTTS, 2014, p. 216). Saudade is the symptom of diasporas and migration, and in the 21st century it has become repressed, warped, and endemic. Travel and tourism package the trauma, submerge it to unconscious depths with cruise ships and souvenirs. The suffering migrants and refugees must collect the residue of trauma leaking from the waxworked memories and in the face of that desperation could still face the response of an imagined stereotypical paranoid nationalist, “to stay out” or “go back to where you came from.” Saudade is the contemporary condition that defines our global identity even as it remains repressed, taboo, and angrily denounced; that alienated state of otherness and sadness is more obscene today than discussions of sexuality and illicit drugs.

The Brown family’s story is a pretext to examine a mobile or diasporic poetics. Their story reads like an epic novel: one cannot believe the scope of their interests, accomplishments, and travel, nor the sheer volume of their writings. Rose and Bob wrote millions of words, and with Cora Brown (1860-1939), Bob’s mother, they all produced at least fourteen cookbooks and party guides like 10,000 Snacks, The South American Cook Book, Salads and Herbs, America Cooks, and The Country Cookbook, ( BROWN; BROWN; BROWN, 1937a, 1937b, 1938, 1939, 1940), and with Bob alone and The Complete Book of Cheese ( BROWN, 1955). By the time they published the cookbook on American cuisine in 1940, they were able to claim that they “put in twenty years of culinary adventuring in as many countries and wrote a dozen books about it” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 11). So, to say that “exile is the model of our contemporary human condition,” as this essay claimed earlier, is not the same as claiming that “we are all exiles,” which “is a lot easier when you are not one yourself, or not really” ( CASSIN, 2016, p. 62). The Browns returned home to Brazil because they were initially exiled and escaped from the United States. Saudade also connotes what Barbara Cassin, the French theorist of nostalgia, illuminates: that feeling of recognizing on a literal return that your home is mortal and now gone forever. This is not a heroic adventurers’ journal of exotic rituals and foods, this is an exiled writer’s efforts to write a cultural and material history through food. The descriptions of foods combine the social practices of its consumption as well as lush, detailed descriptions. Here is a passage from Amazing Amazon:

A humble barefoot employee of the miracle tree’s owner lops off a ripe healthy jaca bigger than our two heads and with a green hide as rough and tough as an alligator’s. Like the fruit of the cacao, these jacas that look like gigantic breadfruit thrust straight out from the trunk on very short stems; and as we look up the fat tree stem we see that it’s studded with fruit in different degrees of ripeness ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 173).

The anecdote starts with this description of picking the fruit and then moves to a description of its consumption. “A single jaca goes a long way, for it’s eaten raw, seed by pulpy seed. Usually, it’s sold in portions of a few seeds covered with the slippery yellowish white pulp that’s sickeningly sweet to our Northern palates. Deathly sweet!.” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 173). They connect the fruit to other tropical fruits. “It somewhat resembles the smaller chirimoya or fruta do Conde; only stickier and not nearly so parfumé, but the fruity pulp is sucked off the black shiny seeds in the same way” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 173). Finally, they place the fruit at the center of a mercantile exchange and an economics lesson.

If you should fall heir to a jaca weighing around fifty pounds, as we did, you could go to the nearest marketplace, sit down and sell it off three or four seeds to a clutch and end up after half a day with a pocketful of coppers. It’s as popular throughout Brazil as chewing gum at home. Once in Rio we saw a sweet shop opened on a corner with one enormous jaca for its entire stock. Kids and oldsters flocked around like flies and we estimated that the take was a couple of dollars, which is a lot of money for just one fruit ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 173).

Travel guides might describe the look of a fruit, and cookbooks its taste, but the description of how to make money selling off parts of the fruit makes the Browns’ efforts something very different from a guide for the idle rich. Rather than assuming his avant-garde and radical work as a reaction against his commercial works, like the cookbooks, one can appreciate how his radicalism took place in the cultural context of “years of tossing up snacks and tossing down drinks in cafés and home kitchens of all foreign capitals” (BROWN, 1937, p. 7). In his own writings, Bob talks about his weariness producing writing for commercial venues, and he often considers himself a kind of writing machine. In that sense, he escaped from the drudgery of being paid per word, and considered his experimental works as departures from the earlier popular pulp stories he churned out. Yet, his travels and cosmopolitan life around the world set the stage for his particular diasporic avant-garde way of working. Working collectively as they traveled, they also created an informal collective identity, called CoRoBo (created from the first two letters of each of their names) in keeping with their fascination with reinventing their identities through pseudonyms, collaborative work, parties, and travel. The corporate name almost looks, and sounds, like a concrete poem with its repeating o’s and its poetic assonance. It also reminds one of the big snake ("No país da cobra grande") in Oswald de Andrade's comment on saudade in his Cannibalism Manifesto of 1928, ( ANDRADE, 1928, p. 3) a couple of years after the Browns left Brazil in 1926 to spend two years traveling around the world and eventually landing in France and joining the expatriate avant-garde there. Luis Fellipe Garcia describes how de Andrade’s “Anthropophagy … could be considered as a decolonial project avant la lettre” ( GARCIA, 2020, p. 124) decades before the term “decolonial” was coined and a century before it has gained wide acceptance and use in cultural theories and scholarship. As Garcia notes, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro describes de Andrade's Anthropophagy "as the only philosophical concept originally articulated in Brazil" ( GARCIA, 2020, p. 124; VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, 2016, p. 14 ). Perhaps now, as Brazil becomes an emerging world power, do scholars recognize it as an intellectual creditor to the global studies rather than a debtor to other conceptualizations like U.S.-based Gayatri Spivak's subaltern or Edward Said's (1978) conceptions of orientalism. ³

For our limited purposes here, Garcia explains that de Andrade uses anthropophagy, or ritualized cannibalism, where one ingests “not only the body of the enemy,” but also the enemy's point of view, as a “metaphor for a procedure of critical assimilation of European culture ... [and] a therapeutic operator to deal with it” ( GARCIA, 2020, p. 124). What is important here is that Garcia explains, partially citing Schulze's insights, that the “influence of this concept upon Brazilian culture cannot be exaggerated; indeed, since its first formulation in the Manifesto (published in 1928), the concept has reverberated in many cultural fields such as literature, music, theatre and cinema (SCHULZE, 2015)” ( GARCIA, 2020, p. 136). Garcia quoting Augusto de Campos, the influential poet who has introduced and written about Bob Brown's visual poetry, explains that is “'why Anthropophagy...is not only ‘the sole original philosophy made in Brazil, but also, in many aspects, the most radical of the artistic movements that we [Brazilians] have produced’” ( CAMPOS, 1976, p. 4). What is remarkable is that Augusto de Campos recognized similar sensibilities in Bob Brown's visual poetry even though de Campos did not know when he wrote the introduction that Bob and Rose Brown lived in Brazil first from 1919 to around 1926 and then again in the 1940s and early 1950s. Here for example is one visual poem in 1450-1950 ( Figure 1) that seems to be a direct reference to de Andrade's Cannibalism Manifesto ( BROWN, 2015, p. 35).

Figure 1 -
“Missionaries” in Bob Brown's 1450-1940

Around the same time the Browns were living in Brazil, the Grupo dos Cinco was forming and creating links to the Surrealists especially around a shared interest in thinking about what we might now call a decolonial anthropology. The Grupo dos Cinco, including Oswald de Andrade, were also interested in that cross-over from poetics and aesthetics to theories of social organization and an emerging structuralism that also circulates around the enigmatic concept of saudade as a sociopoetic term. In that sense both de Andrade and the Browns represent a modernist avant-garde that defined itself, in large part, by its interests in diasporas as well as an avant la lettre decolonial sociopoetics that is defined by resistance to nationalist hysteria; it is more relevant again in our current global situations. Michael Davidson explains, “for the modernist generation, cosmopolitanism implied being a citizen of the world, unmoored from a single place (provincialism) or national identity (nativism)” ( DAVIDSON, 2016, p. 116). This nomadism, in my reading, often wanted to use literary, artistic, and libertine experimentation as a wedge to break open provincialism and nativism. Davidson notes that the effort to serve as the “antenna of the race” distanced the writers and artists from the places and peoples they visited. The distance did push against provincialism, by using “aesthetic distance” to defamiliarize the ideologies of a home country, for example, but it also often created an ethno-centric and Occidental Orientalism. These travelers did not participate in the cultures from which they borrowed ideas and designs. The Browns, however, complicate this impression of the nomadic modernists for they explain that the effort to assuage or in their phrase, matar saudades, literally, to kill the indefinable longing, motivates their trip to the Amazon. Instead of setting out to experience the exotic, primitive, or otherness, they long for their home away from the United States. Their journey was a diasporic return, and they left the US at that time, in part, because of nationalism, colonialism, and war-fever in the US in 1917. They resemble more the contemporary migrants that Davidson describes as the “new cosmopolites ... defined by postcolonial histories of displacement and structural violence that complicate both the idea of a national homeland and the forging of a new, assimilated identity in the host country” ( DAVIDSON, 2016, p. 116). The Browns, in their study of the supposedly savage Amazonians, commented that “it’s easy to see how much more civilized they [the indigenous peoples of the Amazonian basin] are than we,” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 4) . at a time in the 1940s when both Axis and Allied forces aggressively pursued neo-colonialist goals often under the modern guise of a civilizing force.

In the 1930s, Brown became active in communist causes, and wrote two extended essays about communal living and advocated a “bloodless revolution.” To the surprise of his friends, he even toiled away at a progressive commune. In 1935, the Browns founded the Museum of Social Change and the Associated Little Magazines, a coordinating agency and clearing house for over one hundred small labor and radical newsletters and magazines throughout the United States, at Commonwealth College. Brown’s Museum had pushed the already eager legislature to try to take action, and just as the Browns had fled the country before, in part, because of their frustration with war hysteria and the charges of sedition against the publications and activities they worked on as their colleagues at The Masses were being threatened with jail or deportation in 1917 ( SAPER, 2016, p. 111-145). Frustrated with their failed aspirations, they conjured up an adventure that might also pay some bills. The Browns left the States as self-described “defunct rebels” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 4) and first toured Europe and the Soviet Union (1935-1936), renewing his friendships with the avant-garde artists and writers and more firmly establishing his reputation as a Surrealist with the publication of three anthologies of Surrealist work in Americans Abroad, 365 Days, and New Writing. Then, he returned briefly to New York, and soon left again to tour the Soviet Union writing essays about his journey for Colliers, This Week, Esquire, and Coronet. In a typical twist in their radical and pop-culture making lives, they funded their travels with profits from a Hollywood movie treatment for the slapstick comedy Nobodies Baby (1937).

Adventure’s romantic allure took the Browns around the world. From the start, that romanticism had poetic implications, looking for new languages and names, and socio-political goals as they developed a sensibility opposed to conquering heroes; they were self-consciously hosts and guests at a life-long worldwide romantic dinner and cocktail party. This romantic poem about deciding to go to Tahiti, gives a sense of Bob’s association of new unknown names and literal travel.

“Tahiti”

Curious customs, quaint houses, new names, a-
waiting us.
Knowing that where happiness is
I must be.
Lured by romance,
Carried there by something who's name is not
Known.
Yes I will go with you to Tahiti
( BROWN, 1915, p. 41).

The Brown's started the Brazilian American Weekly in São Paulo in 1919. In 1924, they founded the Mexican American magazine in Mexico City, organized the Associated Latin American Magazines, and visited Istanbul, Seville, Vienna, and Paris. In 1925, he also started the British American magazine in London. Finally, in 1928, he sold his complete Brazilian enterprises and sailed around Africa to Japan. He would not return to Brazil for more than a decade. During their research for the Amazon trip, the Browns discovered that Brazil was, in a reversal of the cliché of the colonial powers as more developed civil societies, a destination for emigrants from a less "civilized" country: the United States. They learned that eight to ten thousand defeated Confederate rebels fled to Brazil after the U.S. Civil War, perhaps with the intention to create a new Confederacy because slavery was still legal in Brazil, but with little money they were unable to enslave people there. Instead, they founded a town, Americana ( BRASHER, 2019, p. 1). Sometimes displaced people in a diaspora are enslaving colonizers themselves and that complicates the terms of displaced people and diasporas which usually suggest innocent victims.

When the Browns returned to Brazil, they adopted a poem written by one of these “Defunct Rebels” as their theme song for their trip through the Amazonian region. While it is common to think of the Amazon as untouched by travelers from the outside before the turn of the century (and even until the last decades of the twentieth century), North Americans had, in a forgotten diaspora, arrived in the nineteenth century. The Rebels’ descendants, now multi-racial Afro-Brazilians, still live in Brazil, and in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste they held an annual "Festa Confederada" until 2022 in which the men dress as Confederate soldiers, and the women dress in Southern Belle gowns (surreal for outsiders from the US) ( BRASHER, 2019, p. 1). The rebel battle flag, soldiers’ uniforms, and women’s dresses have semiological meanings, in these celebrations, memorialize a diaspora and an anachronistic time of White supremacy; in the mid-twentieth century some multi-racial participants wore the same costumes; in recent decades it has once again tried to find connections to the rise of violent White power groups in the United States (BRASHER, 2019 p. 1). The floating signifiers now suggest an impossible saudade and an anthropophagic ingesting of the cultural enemy as your own as in de Andrade's sociopoetic manifesto, a return to a past and a homeland that never existed in this multiracial form.

The Browns, who left the US in the teens in part because of the many anti-socialist attacks and war hysteria in Greenwich Village, New York City, left again in the late 1930s because of their frustrations with the lack of radical social change in the United States. In this context, they saw themselves as the new “defunct rebels.” They fled another, and opposite, lost cause of socialist revolution rather than the earlier rebels leaving after the Confederacy lost the war. The notion of defunct rebels, losers in history (whether deserving or not), complicates the usual sympathy with displaced persons. Sometimes displaced persons create war, genocide, or oppression on either the places they flee or the homelands they return to conquer. In addition to this mythology of the displaced as necessarily victims, histories of diasporas often portray the U.S. as the safe haven in a new home (we even have names for those groups, like “Chicano”), a melting pot, rather than as the nation that displaces people to other places and territories. The main exhibit at the Smithsonian Holocaust Museum portrays how the European Jews found a welcoming home in the United States; although the historical record demonstrates a lack of open borders and a less than welcoming situation, it is an enduring myth as it obscures the neverending saudade of refugees and hostility to otherness. The Browns see Brazil as a safe haven of civilization not as an escape to a primitive simpler past. It is a return to civilization, not a vacation from civilization. The Browns comment that “it’s easy to see how much more civilized they are than we” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 10). Comparing themselves to the indigenous people seems contemporary even though they wrote these comments in the early 1940s at a time when both Axis and Allied forces aggressively pursued violent imperialist goals often under the modern guise of a “civilizing” force in a secular version of earlier missionaries.

Their writings and adventures have some of the elements of the tourists’ drive for collecting the exotic, but always with an appreciation of the unique and continuing history of the people and ecology they deal with on their journey. They are self-aware and read the sociopolitical history back into their poetic reflections. Here is an earlier poem by Brown from his Nomadness collection.

“Saudades for Carioca”

Tender tendrils of thought
fond fondling of words
lithe living of life
Color
rainbows dancing
across lacy waves
[…]
native raw-eyed rum
shrimps and cod-fish
mangoes and Antarctica beer
( BROWN, 1931, 53).

Instead of apolitical descriptions of, for example, a supposedly eternally beautiful Church or monument as one might find in a Baedeker’s of the time (although there were none for Brazil until a quarter century later), the Browns include not just a socio-political commentary and history, but a commentary critical of the US. The Browns explain, in Amazing Amazon, that in the late 1870s on into the 20^th century, “North American imperialism pounced on the promising new trade route, and a company was formed” based on land grants and concessions to an American military officer. This new company collected “rubber, dye, woods, and other products of the Amazon and its tributaries ... and consigned these articles to Philadelphia for sale there by the firm. So much for Brazil” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 150). “Quinine bark, hides, sarsaparilla, dye woods, wool, cacao, sugar, cotton, and all kinds of tropical and semi-tropical products to be had from the region” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 150). “Knowing that trouble would come from men far from home forced to work under such horrible conditions” including inadequate food, difficult terrain, long hours of labor ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 150). Not surprisingly, “one of the first buildings” the workers constructed was a “jail for themselves” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 151). “Then, since the laborers were utterly at the mercy of their dollar-dippy masters in a wasteland where slavery was still in flower [until 1888 when slavery was outlawed in Brazil], every crumb of food was locked up and nobody got a thing to eat except the bosses, until the men decided that even slavery was better than death by starvation” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 152). This situation changed as the effort switched from natural resources to building a railroad.

They describe in detail the oppressive and barbarous tyranny. Workers who did not comply with the impossible conditions were commonly whipped, and the North American railway builders continued their torture as late as 1911 ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 152-153). These descriptions in the middle of travel writing about food, fauna, and exotic locales, seek to encourage the reader to imagine “the greater bestiality” of the North Americans rather than imagine a pretty and unspoiled landscape. Their version of the Amazon does not play the role of the last untouched reserve against civilization’s hustle and bustle, a pristine primitivist fantasy. For those working on the railroad, “it wasn’t long before the job was killing its man for every one of those tragic cross ties laid” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 153). “They died off like flies and the whole project had to be abandoned when only a few miles of track had been laid” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 153). One would want to think that the sacrifice produced at least some semblance of perverse progress. Instead, like the inspiration for Werner Herzog’s Fitzcaraldo, they produced little that lasted. ⁴ “A single locomotive was assembled and run over a tiny stretch of narrow gauge triumphantly to celebrate the 4^th of July in 1878. And that was all” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 153). The remains depict a diaspora of a proud civilization, a lushness and knowing sophistication that inspires the travelers. What the Browns find is not a primitive culture before the corrupting influence of the advanced West, but a culture under attack from barbarians. They do not simply de-mythologize but acknowledge their foibles and actively seek to join in the advanced guard of an Amazonian civilization that they aspire to emulate as they explain the sadness of the tropics is from the brutal oppression of the “civilizing” colonizers not the indigenous people whose cuisines and lifestyle are described admiringly not as exotic, primitive, or strange, but as delightful. Instead of the conquering hero, the Browns exemplify a new type of visitor. This new type of traveler appears in a magical-realist-like description they recount of much earlier travelers. The Browns describe a magic realist tale they hear about a young woman graciously lending a hand to her hosts, sleeping near them, but while she slept, she was protected by “fireflies tied by their antennae to her hair; so any movement of her head during the night, would illuminate her and anyone in the hammocks around her” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 240). To illuminate the traveler’s every move instead of making her invisible seeks to reorient tourism, not as a punishment, but as a poetic opening. This other type of guide unveils something known well, but, nevertheless, usually missing from tourist destinations: an invitation to celebrate with those you meet.

On the one hand, Bob sees the adventure in terms of his research for Hollywood movies, and, for example, he thinks about ways to consider turtle eggs the size of ping-pong balls in an adventurous slap-stick movie treatment as a weapon to stop villains with an egg fight. He did write treatments for silly slapstick movies at the very same time that he was involved with radical progressive movements in the United States like founding the Museum of Social Change. They did not see their radical efforts as anathema to either writing slapstick for Hollywood or serving as Goodwill Ambassadors in Brazil for the United States government. They did not see the avant-garde as opposed to either the leftist popular front or popular culture. Likewise, they did not see their voracious collecting in Brazil as in conflict with wanting to tell the sociopolitical history of the indigenous people’s forced labor, diasporas, and genocides. The Browns collected stuff like baby anteater skin (“we put andiroba oil on it to keep it from mildewing until we can get it tanned)”, or “straw covered bottles and bird-nest baskets” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 73). They also recognized the exotic wonders of the place. “Parrots come in all sizes, colors and noises, from the great gaudy shrieking macaw through medium-size royal purple, mauve, and golden-headed louros who are terrific talkers” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 95).

They ate “salted capivara […] plus tapir, jaboti, alligator tail, both turtle and sea cow mixira, parrot and smoked monkey, never did sink tooth in that mythical guanaco meat. Might as well ask for a unicorn steak […]” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 98). At one point a boat captain suggests a party. The menu includes “a five gallon tin full of rich mixira-the kind made of sea cow, naturally, since turtle put up in toothsome mixira style is almost prohibitive in price these days” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 116). Another passenger requests “a plate of toucan tongues.” The captain concurs adding how useful the tongues are “to suck up the turtle eggs.” They describe eating koro, a “pale-colored grub” found in “rotting tree-trunks” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 159). The grub is “a fat, cream colored creature, rather like a silkworm [and] the body spurted a whitish, fatty substance" which Bob or Rose “managed to taste after some hesitation; it has the consistency and delicacy of butter, and the flavor of coconut milk” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 160). They never act too squeamish but eat with the enjoyment of learning a new name, a new word, a new pleasure, a delicacy one longs for (i.e. saudade). To understand them, one might need an ethnography of travel and moving homes instead of a study of their non-existent single hometown from which they draw their inspiration. This avant-garde interest in travel and cosmopolitanism may have also impacted the foundation of modern ethnography probably not directly from the Browns to Claude Lévi-Strauss, but in the atmosphere of the times and the sensibilities of the writers.

Around the same time the Browns visited the Amazon, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) also was doing research there, and Strauss may have met the Browns. He mentions having an un-named friend who was a gourmet and book collector in São Paulo ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1995, p. 100); the Browns were at the time well-known gourmands and book collectors and had their home near São Paulo. Whether they knew each other, or not, their works represent particularly apt examples of late modernist (even emerging postmodernist) travelers and their concerns about diasporas. As is well-known, they both knew André Breton, and both were influenced by Surrealism and the emerging modernist avant-garde. Lévi-Strauss exchanged letters about aesthetics and originality, especially in regard to Brazil. How did the avant-garde influences change travel writing, especially in these examples?

Their journey up the Amazon was “a long trip equal to crossing North America three times” ( BROWN; BROWN, 1942, p. 3). With the context of their past in place, it is instructive to place Claude Lévi-Strauss’s foundational scholarly works next to the Brown’s writing that covered similar ground. Lévi-Strauss describes the ritual dress of the Caduveo (and other peoples in neighboring areas) in terms of Lewis Carroll’s descriptions of Alice’s encounter with the knightly figures from a deck of cards. Likewise, the Brown’s refer to Carroll to help explain the eating rituals they wrote about in their cookbook on the preparation and social history of snacks. Again, my larger project on the Browns examines the cookbooks in greater depth, but their interest in the avant-garde showed up in their most popular works. Like Lévi-Strauss, and perhaps explaining the possibility that they knew each other, the Browns were also doing anthropological collecting of folk art for the National Museum of Brazil at Aracaju.

After an extended description of the face paintings, dress, myths, and rituals associated with these costumes, Lévi-Strauss explains why this style is reminiscent of European playing cards. In that discussion, he concludes by noting that “we must do more than merely study their design; we must also ask ourselves what purpose they serve” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1992, p. 195). ⁵ He writes, “facial paintings confer human dignity on the individual; they ensure the transition from nature to culture […] they express differences in status within a complex society” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1992, p. 195). He concludes that “the remedy they failed to use on the social level, or which they refused to consider, could not elude them completely” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1992, p. 196). It showed up in the masks, the art, and culture. The Browns and Lévi-Strauss, with their interests in the avant-garde, saw these expressions of irreconciled contradictions not as a naïve primitivism, but as a model to produce their own art on the cultural contradictions of travel, tourism, and even anthropology.

The people the young anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss, encounters on his journeys already have demythologized anthropology and the Orientalist and Primitivist desires of the west. So, they turn the tables on the anthropologists. Lévi-Strauss does not pretend to find a primitive people and oral culture un-corrupted by the writing/écriture of the modern world (as a misinterpretation of Jacques Derrida’s seminal reading, in Of Grammatology, of Lévi-Strauss' work on Brazil suggests); instead, Lévi-Strauss finds the sophisticated people playing him for all he’s worth. He discusses the myth of native peoples not wanting their pictures taken in fear that it will steal their souls as a myth of the Europeans’ fantasy of an innocent primitive past. Here is how the Caduveo play their role:

Young anthropologists are taught that natives are afraid of having their image caught in a photograph, and that it is proper to overcome this fear and compensate them for the risk they think they are taking by making them a present in money or in kind. The Caduveo had perfected the system: not only did they insist on being paid before allowing themselves to be photographed; they forced me to photograph them so that I should have to pay. Hardly a day went by but a woman came to me in some extraordinary get-up and obliged me, whether I wanted to or not, to pay her photographic homage, accompanied by a few milreis. Being anxious not to waste my film, I often just went through the motions and handed over the money ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1992, p. 176).

The quote suggests that the foundation of modern anthropology is based on an ironic going through the motions. It sounds like a parody of itself! The sadness of the tropics is not that some primitive natural state receded long ago, but that the growers wiped out the people, their culture, and their cultural aspirations by a deliberate and ruthless genocide. The nostalgia is for a writing that preceded what some take to be the pure primitive; and that supposedly pure primitive state Lévi-Strauss criticizes as soothing with a good conscience.

Lévi-Strauss explains that since the early 1970s, “evidence has accumulated to show that the present picture does not reflect archaic conditions. The peoples of Central Brazil and elsewhere are remnants […] of more advanced and more populous civilizations […] along the whole course of the Amazon” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1995, p. 11). Rather than the isolated rural populations we mythologize in the jungles, the region of the Amazon basin had “a very dense population” with a population “once seven or eight million.” The housing did not consist of simple huts, but “hundreds of houses of a dazzling whiteness.” The markers of modern civilization, like “monumental sculptures” and “well maintained roads, and orchards” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1995, p. 11), existed 100 years before the invaders came; forcing the people to move around the region and move out. Thus, the barbaric invaders displaced the once urban populations, the region depopulated, and the civilization later looked primitive. So many people lived there that, when the massacring European soldiers arrived, they described how an arrow shot randomly would kill ” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1995, p. 11). Although later Europeans dismissed these claims as boasts, in part to play down the extent of the massacres, Lévi-Strauss’s evidence sought to upset the convenient and more “soothing to the conscience” explanations ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1995, p. 12).

The Portuguese committed “a monstrous genocide” and “far from being primitives, the Indians (as they have become known since the study of them began in the last century) survive as the wreckage of these prior civilizations” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1995, p. 14). “Dispossessed of our culture, stripped of values that we cherished - the purity of water and air, the charms of nature, the diversity of animals and plants - we are all Indians henceforth, making of ourselves what we made of them” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1995, p. 19). This is far from an image of an untrampled pristine world and makes diaspora a much more complicated issue. First, sometimes the displaced become colonizers like the Puritans arriving in North America and some of the formerly persecuted Portuguese arriving in Brazil. Second, there is not a primitive pre-civilized natural state lost in diaspora. Finally, the notion of mythology itself owes more to avant-garde practices used to describe Amazonian people and culture than to an archeologist’s drive to uncover an un-displaced culture. Perhaps a better translation of Tristes Tropiques is Saudades Do Brasil as that illuminates the sensibility and sociopoetic situation described in the book.

Lévi-Strauss develops the theory of mythology in his book The Raw and the Cooked using the Bororo people of Brazil as the cultural example. He uses a discussion of concrete music and serial music to explain structuralism and how myth resides between music and speech (not speech and writing). “Music has its being in me, and I listen to myself through it” and “the myth and the musical work are like conductors of an orchestra, whose audience becomes the silent performers.” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1969, p. 17). Instead of thinking of mythologies as having a definitive exposed unified reality, Lévi-Strauss explains, “there is no real end to mythological analysis, no hidden unity to be grasped once the breaking-down process has been completed” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1969, p. 5). In fact, he admits that his “book on myths is itself a kind of myth," but he does not apologize for this artificial mythology; instead, he wants to make it a reality “in the mind of the reader.” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1969, p. 6). ⁶

The Browns, similarly, see the Amazonian folk not as the primitive Other but as a model of diasporic civilizations. They join in the cultures, rather than romanticize a simpler life. Lévi-Strauss begins his foundational book Tristes Tropiques by confessing “I hate traveling and explorers,” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1992, p. 17) and explains that “Amazonia, Tibet, Africa fill the bookshops in the form of travelogues, accounts of expeditions and collections of photographs, in all of which the desire to impress is so dominant as to make it impossible for the reader to assess the value of the evidence put before him. Instead of having his critical faculties stimulated, he asks for more such pabulum and swallows prodigious quantities of it” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1992, p. 17). Bob’s poetry, similarly, often skewers the guides, visitors, and travelers just as Lévi-Strauss realizes the sought-after pure encounter with the supposedly primitive folk was, to borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida, “always already” compromised by a writing system of culture that preceded supposedly pure speech ( DERRIDA, 1997, p. 235). Derrida's discusses the problems with Lévi-Strauss' structuralist enterprise in terms of the concept of structure as an organizing metaphor rather than a reality that one finds in the world. So, the structuralist system depends on the deep structure existing outside of the analysis in a metaphysical construction that the materialism of the structuralist enterprise sought to supersede. Instead of a mythological God or system organizing culture, it is the sociolingustic and socio-cultural binaries that organize cultural systems with the foundational opposition between "nature" and "culture" as the center of this system of analysis. In his foundational work in structuralist analysis, Lévi-Strauss' seems to depend on the same philosophical problems of a metaphysical explanations of Gods and spirits he seeks to avoid and criticize in his discussion of cultural mythologies. Lévi-Strauss himself makes it clear, as discussed above, that he appreciates the problem with the oppositional relation between nature and culture or primitive and literate. As he points out in a passage that Derrida cites at length in Of Grammatology, and elsewhere, the practice of incest creates a philosophical "scandal" for the anthropologist because it exists both universally (and is therefore in the realm of nature) and particular to kinship rules and pratices (and therefore exists as a cultural norm).

Levi-Strauss, ... encounters what he calls a scandal, that is to say, something which no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he has accepted and which seems to require at one and the same time the predicates of nature and those of culture. This scandal is the incest-prohibition. The incest-prohibition is universal; in this sense one could call it natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this sense one could call it cultural. ( DERRIDA, 1978, p. 282)

Although, kinship systems have different cultural prohibitions against incest, the prohibitions appear universally across cultures, and thus might exist as under the category of the natural. Lévi-Strauss understands, as Derrida highlights, that the two terms "nature" and "culture" do not exist abstractly as mutually exclusive and stable outside the play of languages; instead, they depend on each other as imbricated and entangled rather than as a binary; the binary and difference is differed. Structuralism and anthropology depend on this opposition as a foundation even as, under examination, it is a blurry and shifting boundary ( DERRIDA, 1978, p. 282). Lévi-Strauss' solution, which draws from Surrealism and is similar to the Brazilian avant-gardists' practices, like de Andrade's cultural cannibalism, is the activity of "bricolage," and the anthropologist functioning as a "bricoleur," related to the French verb "bricoler" by a handyman or one who does odd jobs and makes things out of the materials one has lying about: a tinkerer or a funileiro in Portugeuse. Lévi-Strauss puts this tinkerer in a binary opposed to the practices of an engineer, who thinks of the big picture first, and plans out the specific construction, and only then begins the project. The bricoleur uses structuralist binaries such as nature and culture as a pragmatic and contingent tool rather than an abstract metaphysical truth. For Lévi-Strauss, de Andrade, and the Browns, they travel as bricoleurs rather than tour guides; they are collaborators more than romantic tourists on holiday.

Bob Brown had published a poem in 1930, included in his Globe-Gliding collection, that seems very much in line with the emerging resistance to the tourism industry that we see in Oswald de Andrade's work in the late 1920s. Brown would have been familiar with de Andrade's work, and both were part of the literary avant-garde of the 1920s and through the middle of the twentieth century.

“Guides”
Guides with pimply faces
uncouth unbuttoned mouths and
leering lecherous slobbery eyes;
guides who spew upon the
beauty of everything seen
in their company.
Wordy, mouthy, mumbling guides:
“This is the great stone now
made of rock
right here very historic
the great stone
what they used then for that.
This is it
famous for centuries.
This is it, right here, sir!”
Guides with shifty dribbly glances
pointing smudgy fingers at
crystalline alabasters
nearlywearing out decrepit jokes violating hallowed historic spots sway-backed, bow-legged
sag-bellied, knock-kneed
coaxing, pleading
brow-beating, bullying
Guides
casting their bloated
hideous, besmirching shadows over all the
most beautiful places of the world.
( BROWN, 1930, p. 50-51).

The nasty description seems more contemporary with our cynical postmodern era rather than from a time when most observers considered mass tourism for the middle class both romantic and relatively rare. One would expect a travel poem to unapologetically embrace and celebrate the important monument while cropping the image of the guide out of sight. Bob’s poem gives a different view in the conventions and style of the form it parodies. Here is another of Bob’s poems from his Nomadness collection which parodies the claims report for damaged goods and the entire travel and tourism industry ( BROWN, 1931, p. 20-21).

“Tourist Insurance”

This simple instrument
insures and guarantees
your baggage
or any part or parcel thereof
properly labeled, invoiced,
evaluated, catalogued, enumerated and
initialed
against any manner of
accident of whatsoever nature
which simply cannot possibly happen
under any circumstances
and specifically
denies any and all responsibility
once the baggage
has left the
alleged residence of the
hereinbefore mentioned
so-called believed-to-be traveler.
Take it or leave it
nothing whatsoever will be paid
for the loss, breakage,
leakage,
theft or damage
of/or, to/or, by/of, or/and
any article in the baggage

Modern writers, vanguardists, from a visual and satirical poet (Brown) to a young anthropologist (Lévi-Strauss) to an important poet and poetic cultural theorist (Oswald de Andrade), already described the politics of a situation, against the violent “civilizing” colonizing of missionaries, usually left invisible in both social scientific and travelers’ accounts of under-developed, primitive, or exotic peoples. The experiments in poetry and art, especially in relation to Imagism and the influence of the Armory Show of 1914, led quickly, profoundly, and lastingly to a generation of poets and artists conceiving of their lives in terms of a diasporic search for a utopian internationalist and cosmopolitan everyday life. The Browns’ writings, from the cookbooks to the visual poetry, were guides to popularize a way to eat, travel, and party: not as outsiders fascinated by quaint primitive customs, but as participants; not as taxonomists, but socio-poets. Not as tour guides but hosts and guests. They traveled up the Amazon as longing bricoleurs looking for the poetic juxtaposition including the embedded social and political history, and potential futures, in the present moment. Every recipe and journey an encounter with saudade.

Bill Bryson concludes his At Home: A Short History of Private Life by explaining that in the wealthy imperialist efforts to conceive of homes and homelands, and to find comfort and security in our construction of the idea of being at home, we cannot help but make our world less environmentally comfortable and insecure inherently based on the notion of home. "The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither" ( BRYSON, 2010, p. 532). The very notion of being homesick begins at home -- and it makes saudade a complicated term like écriture (that is more than the French word for writing) that ultimately indicates, in layers of signification, an impossible longing, an unrequited desire, and an uncanny (unheimlich) sickness from both the imperialist's and tourist's concept of a home versus the exotic and primitive otherness. In that sense, decolonial theorization begins at home and began in Brazil.

References

• ANDRADE, Oswald de. Manifesto Anthropofago [Cannibalism Manifesto]. Revista de Antropófagia, São Paulo, v. 1, n. 1, p. 1-4, 1928.
• ARENDT, Hannah. “We Refugees,” The Menorah Journal. The Jew as Pariah: Jewish identity and politics in the modern age. Edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Grove Press, distributed by Random House, 1978.
• BOUTANG, Pierre-André; CHEVALLAY, Annie (dir.). Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words Arte editions, 2008.
• BRASHER, Jordan. Brazil’s long, strange love affair with the Confederacy ignites racial tension. The Conversation, 6 May 2019. Available from: https://theconversation.com/brazils-long-strange-love-affair-with-the-confederacy-ignites-racial-tension-115548 Accessed in: 29 Sep. 2023.
  » https://theconversation.com/brazils-long-strange-love-affair-with-the-confederacy-ignites-racial-tension-115548
• BROWN, Bob. 1450-1950 Black Mountain, North Carolina: Jargon Society Press, 1959.
• BROWN, Bob. 1450-1950 Edited and introduced by Craig Saper, new facsimile edition. Roving Eye Press, 2015.
• BROWN, Bob. Global-Gliding Diessen, Germany: Roving Eye Press, 1930.
• BROWN, Bob. Nomadness New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1931.
• BROWN, Bob. The complete book of cheese New York: Gramercy Publishing Company, 1955.
• BROWN, Bob. Tahiti: 10 Rhythms, Bruno Chapbooks 1.4. New York: Guido Bruno, 1915.
• BROWN, Cora; BROWN, Rose; BROWN, Bob. 10,000 Snacks, a Cookbook of Canapés, Savories, Relishes, Hors D’oeuvres, Sandwiches and Appetizers for before, after and between Meals New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937a.
• BROWN, Cora; BROWN, Rose; BROWN, Bob. America Cooks: Favorite recipes from 48 states. W.W. Norton, 1940.
• BROWN, Cora; BROWN, Rose; BROWN, Bob. Salads and herbs Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1938.
• BROWN, Cora; BROWN, Rose; BROWN, Bob. The Country Cookbook; Cooking, canning and preserving victuals for country home, farm, camp & trailer. The Country Series. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937b.
• BROWN, Cora; BROWN, Rose; BROWN, Bob. The South American cookbook: Including Central America, Mexico, and the West Indies. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1939.
• BROWN, Rose; BROWN, Bob. Amazing Amazon New York: Modern Age Books, 1942.
• BRYSON, Bill. At Home: A short history of private life. New York: Random House, 2010.
• BURRIDGE, Kenelm Oswald Lancelot. Claude Lévi-Strauss: Fieldwork, explanation, and experience. Theory and Society, v. 2, n. 4, p. 563-586, 1975.
• CAMPOS, Augusto de. Bob Brown: poemas ópticos (1965). In: CAMPOS, Augusto de. À margem da margem São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989. p. 126-141. (Originalmente publicado no Suplemento Literário de O Estado de São Paulo, 9 jan. 1965).
• CAMPOS, Augusto de. Revista de Anthropófagia São Paulo: Reedição da Revista Literaria and Abril Cultural, 1976.
• CASSIN, Barbara. Nostalgia: When are we ever at home? Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.
• CHURCHILL, Allen. The Improper Bohemians: A recreation of Greenwich Village in its heyday. New York: E. F. Dutton & Company, 1959.
• DAVIDSON, Michael. On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of NAFTA. In: NOLAND, Carrie; WATTEN, Barret (ed.). Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental poetics and cultural displacement. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016. p. 115-136.
• DERRIDA, Jacques. Of Grammatology Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
• DERRIDA, Jacques. Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences. In: DERRIDA, Jacques. Writing and difference Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. p. 278-294.
• GARCIA, Luis Fellipe. Only Anthropophagy unites us - Oswald de Andrade’s decolonial project. Cultural Studies, v. 34, n. 1, p. 122-142, 2020.
• KALTENBACHER, Wolfgang. “Departures.” Diogenes, v. 60, n. 2, p. 16-23, 2015.
• KINGSLEY, Mary H. Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons. London: Macmillan, 1897.
• LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. “The setting sun” interview. New Left Review, p. 71-83, jan./feb. 2013.
• LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. Saudades do Brasil: A photographic memoir. Translated from the French by Sylvia Modelski. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.
• LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked Translated from the French by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
• LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. Tristes Tropiques Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Penguin, 1992.
• MATT, Susan J. Homesickness: An American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. OK
• POTTS, John. Journeys through the past: Contempt, nostalgia, enigma. In: NIEMEYER, Katharina (ed.). Media and nostalgia: Yearning for the past, present and future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies series, 2014. p. 212-222.
• SAID, Edward. Orientalism London: Penguin, 1978.
• SAPER, Craig. Artificial mythologies: A guide to cultural invention. Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1997.
• SAPER, Craig. The amazing adventures of Bob Brown New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.
• SONTAG, Susan. The Anthropologist as Hero. In: SONTAG, Susan. Against Interpretation London: Vintage, 1994. p. 69-81.
• SPIVAK, Gayatri. Can the subaltern speak? Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
• VINGERHOETS, Adrianus Johannes Josephus Maria. The homesickness concept: Questions and doubts. In: VINGERHOETS, Adrianus Johannes Josephus Maria; VAN TILBURG, Maria Adriana Louisa. Psychological aspects of geographical moves Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. p. 1-16.
• VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, Eduardo. O que temos nós com isso? In: AZEVEDO, Ana Beatriz Sampaio Soares (ed.). Antropofagia: Palimpsesto selvagem. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2016. p. 11-19.
• WILLIAMS, Raymond. Structures of feeling. In: WILLIAMS, Raymond (ed.). Marxism and literature Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. p. 128-135.

• 1
  These are the opening lines of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques. A number of other studies explore why Lévi-Strauss disliked travelers and tourists including: Burridge (1975); Boutang and Chevallay (2008); Kaltenbacher (2015); Kingsley (1897); Lévi-Strauss (2013); Sontag (1994). Williams (1977).
• 2
  Oswald de Andrade, from Manifesto Antropófago [Cannibalism Manifesto] (Revista de Antropofagia, Ano 1, n. 1, maio de 1928), page 3 and continued on page 7, introduces a dislike of the tourists' homesickness and introduces the concept of a metaphoric reading of cannibalism as cultural resistance against imperialism of colonists in the guise of missionaries and tourists. In doing so, he suggests what is now known as decolonial theory. Under de Andrade's byline, he dates the piece provocatively, "Em Piratininga Ano 374 da Deglutição do Bispo Sardinha," to directly connect the manifesto to Bishop Sardinha. Sardinha arrived in Brazil in 1551, and in 1556 on a travel near present-day Coruripe, his boat was shipwrecked, and he and his crew were killed and eaten. It is remarkable how colonizing missionaries are also the target of Bob Brown's visual poem. It was a contested area with Portuguese and Dutch invaders and brutal colonization as well as slave escapes, re-enslavement at the end of the seventeenth-century, conflicts in the 19th century, and in the early twentieth-century foreign corporations rumored to have murdered an entrepreneur to take over his factory. The modernist avant-garde broadside, Revista de Antropofagia, was published in São Paulo in 26 issues between May 1928 and February 1929. Raul Bopp was listed as the managing editor and António de Alcântara Machado as the editorial director. The pages are unnumbered, and the manifesto appears on the third page. The Noigandres group member, Augusto de Campos' introduction to the facsimile edition of the Revista de Anthropofagia discusses Oswald's manifesto and its influence on the Brazilian avant-garde ( CAMPOS, 1976, p. 4). Augusto de Campos also wrote an introduction to Brown's 1450-1950 without knowing that Brown had ever lived in Brazil in the 1920s. Brown may have known de Andrade.
• 3
  These foundational scholars of decolonial theory were based in colonizing countries, even though they were themselves migrants or exiles, and wrote their most influential works following the Brazilian Oswald de Andrade by 70 or 80 years. The beginning of Spivak’s (1988) academic career was based primarily on the introduction to Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology which is an extended reading of Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques.
• 4
  Werner Herzog’s Fitzcaraldo is based on the history of the Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald's efforts to shuttle a steamboat over the dry land of an isthmus.
• 5
  Lévi-Strauss explains why this style is reminiscent of European playing cards. In that discussion, he concludes by noting that “we must do more than merely study their design; we must also ask ourselves what purpose they serve” ( LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1992, p. 195).
• 6
  See Lévi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked, pg. 6. In my Artificial Mythologies: A Guide to Cultural Invention ( 1997), I explain a multiculturalist practice that now could easily be called decolonization: "Multiculturalism need not limit itself to descriptions of ever broader groups of previously unacknowledged literatures and cinemas. It need not function only as a category for something resembling an Orientalist project of describing the otherness of exotic literatures and marginal national cinemas. ... [Instead] a multicultural practice and [and] an artificial mythology for multiculturalist research [would propose an entirely different epistemology]. Just as the older mythologies of a singular community and shared culture begin to show serious signs of wear and an inability to stretch to fit the changing demographics of contemporary societies, the mere addition of more and other kinds of literature and [media] does not go far enough. The real novelty and excitement of [artificial mythology] arises from its ability to function as a methodology and a system of research. ... to analyze the history of [culture, literature, media] in terms of creolization rather than just study multicultural [media]. It demonstrates how otherness already exists in the familiar [media] practices as long as the viewer changes the focus of the situation. As soon as cultural critics begin to see double and to blur the distinctions between them and us, then the possibility of a multicultural [artificial mythology] practice begins… Using this mixed-up identity as a research model not only disrupts the mythology of the traveler who always confirms his own self as different from the natives but also implies an artificial mythology where mixed-up identity becomes the very basis for the photographic image and the [media] experience. The historical facts remain the same. The focus changes. It begins to look like a pop-art installation on out­of-self experiences. Of course, multiculturalism as a research methodology wants to challenge the self-complacency of a culture that admits no mixing. ... The [artificial mythology] travel machine ... promises a "becoming-other" ( SAPER, 1997, p. 93).

Edited by

Editor-in-chief - Linguistics:

Bethania Mariani

Guest editors:

Pierluigi Basso-Fossali, Renata Mancini

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  18 Dec 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  05 June 2023
• Accepted
  19 July 2023