“The abominable man of the tropics”. Oswald de Andrade in the rereadings of Haroldo de Campos

Abstract

 By stating that Oswald de Andrade’s work, in particular the “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil” and the “Manifesto Antropófago”, constitutes a critical view of history as a negative function, capable of both appropriation and expropriation, Haroldo de Campos establishes a fundamental continuity between the Oswaldian gesture of rereading the past in a disruptive or synchronic way and his critical-essay work of proposing new past-presents. In this wake and from the reading of Campos’ essays, this article, on the one hand, investigates to what extent the rereadings or “contextual retrospective” carried out by Campos on Oswald de Andrade’s work and Brazilian Modernism contribute to reviewing and re-discussing Brazilian literature culture, by proposing another critical and historiographical tradition and re-dimensioning  literature and national consciousness notions, while, on the other hand, it questions how the unabused devouring of the “abominable man of the tropics” against the impostures of the civilized contributed to broaden the critical thinking of this concretist poet.