Antropofagias periféricas: o movimento marginal, a crítica da tradição e os contra-usos da literatura

Abstract

The article contrasts the Movement of Marginal Literature in São Paulo with past cultural experiences, especially the modernism. At first, I return to the foremost demands of the modernist avant-garde expressed during the 1922 Modern Art Week. Based on the concept of “selective tradition”, by Raymond Williams, I analyze how contemporary marginal agents, with the 2007 Modern Art Week of the Periphery and the Peripheral Anthropophagy Manifesto, performed a revising of Brazilian cultural history. The manifestos launched, the resignifications proposed, as well as the underlying aesthetic reorientations reveal political counter-uses of the idea of avant-garde. My argument is that the process of formation of the movement from the peripheries has depended on critical displacements practiced by its members in relation to a tradition that did not contemplate them. These displacements reveal an “anthropophagic power”, which takes place in the place of enunciation but extends toward the literary form.