“After years of neglect, this category was revived in the 1960s and ’70s under the pressure of military dictatorships and debates around “dependency theory,” which sought to understand Latin America’s economic underdevelopment and its dependency on the United States. In the arts, debates raged across the continent: If our economy and culture has been imported from Europe, how can the South overcome this position of being a bastard copy of the North? How can we know what is or is not properly ours? What can be considered a truly Latin American art and philosophy? Or as Marta Traba would ask: Can Pop art occur in Latin America without the existence of a truly accessible mass culture? In the midst of this debate, the category of the anthropophagus reemerged as a way to reclaim the mestizo and anthropophagous nature of the South’s intellectual production, and offered a means for reworking Euro-America concepts without any need to “be authentic,” and without being predestined to represent “cactus, parrots, and palm trees.””
Autor, professor e pesquisador