Meet me in the middle of the air and if these wings don’t fail me I will meet you anywhere aint no grave can hold my body down… -Odetta, Aint no grave To describe the relationship between a body and forces acting upon it we must discuss how a body falls in space. […]
Cannibal, Canibalia
In “Dead Capital,” Diana Taylor references Oswald de Andrade’s notion of cultual cannibalism, which asserts “that cultures remain strong by eating and digesting others” (Taylor 2). The metaphor of cannibalism is indeed an illuminating one, if a bit unsettling, in how it succinctly figures incorporated processes of hybridity, (re)appropriation, and consumption as cultural phenomena. The […]
DEJAR IR PARA DEJAR DE MATAR(SE)
“The cannibalism of capitalism unites us,” says Diana Taylor in her text. We understand. We are familiar with this kind of cannibalism; we’ve lived it; we’ve talked about it; we have been addicted and felt the push and pull of devouring, whatever: a person not a person. In 1928, Andrade said yes to cannibalism, but […]
Garbage Politics
Diana Taylor argues that “Capitalism has desecrated matter and destroyed the material supports for human life…We are in the land of the production of death” (10). Through a walking through the performance of Bom Retiro 958 metros by Teatro da Vertigem, Taylor observes how the capitalist system consumes us and then spits us out– as commodity, as consumer, as […]
Cannibalism, the “New” Pedagogical Diet
Viveiros de Castro and Oswald de Andrade know Marx and Freud, the ethnographic and blind discourses of “the savage” created in the XIX Century, and the critical paradigms that have shaped the anthropology and the production of cultural artifacts in the West, and by extension, in Latin America. I want to highlight the time distance […]
Subsistence. Knowledge. Cannibalism.
During the performance Bom Retiro 958 metros, Diana Taylor convey a recurrent sensation of estrangement. It seemed an experience of confusion, astonishment, and bewilderment which forced her to stay present, in the active practice of observing. It seems that no previous knowledge could be pertinent to guide her experience; “It’s hard to gauge what matters […]
Discovered Happiness
“Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.” (de Andrade 94) This one line, phrase, sentence, or whatever you shall call it has been running through my mind since I first read Oswald de Andrade’s The Cannibalist Manifesto. I keep thinking about how so many people from before modernity up until now live/ lived […]
Towards an eating epistemology
The first time I read Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” I dwelt some time on the following footnote: . Without spending too much time on the ball, Wilson is that tricky object-subject resisting full objectification, even in the theater of relationality Viveiros de Castro outlines above. Wilson, Brown—and Taylor—might argue, is a thing, what Viveiros de Castro calls an […]
Keeping Up on Sundays
This weekend I find myself consuming and being consumed, now entertaining the ways in which this state can be one of sordid “glass half empty” or blissful “glass half full” existence. As Diana Taylor says in Dead Capital, we are at once the spectator and the product (15), both the almond milk and the almond […]
Becoming and the Pact
In Cannibal Metaphysics, de Castro writes, “Every becoming is an alliance. Which does not mean, once again, that every alliance is a becoming” . I am fascinated by this sentence because it reminds me of the idea of the “pact,” which I am writing about for my group’s final project. According to the Oxford English […]