“Affective, Love. Speculative, Science.”

(The Cannibalist Manifesto, Oswald de Andrade)

The poetry of these lines toward the end of the Cannibalist Manifesto identifies a major binary in the process of colonization, and our understanding of it. The creation of religious constructs of speculative societal judgement and allopathic sciences in occidental modernity causes colonialism to enter into the psychology of the colonized, targetting their ancient healing traditions and community.

How do we go from clothed, Freudian-minded individuals back to spirit, and vice versa? How do we think with colonized minds, and decolonized minds? How can we understand this split within ourselves? How do we exist in this binary between Love and Science? Cannibalism: To eat another, or from another; or on someone’s table, to colonize, shame, and punish their sexuality, the way they adorn their land and themselves, even the way that they speak, this is truly the totalizing genocide ruling our modern identities. The continuous cannibalistic affect of speculating instead of loving, judging instead of hearing, is what will continue to create constructs of difference that separate us rather than unite us, bringing us further from what Andrade calls “everyday love,” to begin again to “to believe in signals, to believe in the instruments and the stars.”

Works Cited

Oswald de Andrade (1999) The Cannibalist manifesto, , 13:46, 92-95, DOI: 10.1080/09528829908576784