Writing the Revolution

Panel 1: “Writing the Revolution” at the International Conference “The other 68: Anthropophagic Revolutions in Brazilian Counterculture after 1968” at Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, 23-25 May 2018

Chair: Daniel Fairfax (Frankfurt)

Peter W. Schulze (Köln)
“Brasíliocartésiomaquias”: Colonial History and Post-‘68 Counter Culture in Paulo Leminski‘s Novel Catatau

Catatau, an experimental novel published in 1975 by Paulo Leminski, one of the protagonists of concrete poetry in the 1960s, reprises Oswald de Andrade‘s antropofagia in the spirit of Tropicalist counter culture. It shows a fictionalized René Descartes waiting in the botanical garden of Dutch Brazil (1630-1654) for the Vice-Governor of the colony, who staggers by in drunken stupor at the end of the novel. The novel interlaces the colonial history of Brazil with that of the capital city of Brasília, inaugurated in 1960 and turned into the seat of the military regime four years later. Through a reading of the novel’s kaleidoscopic regime of time, this paper highlights Leminiski’s ironic inversion of Cartesianism as a kind of “colonialist rationalism” (Glauber Rocha).

Oliver Precht (München/Berlin)
Chickening out. On the Revolution of Clarice Lispector

“Onward we march”, proclaims Oswald de Andrade: from the French to the Bolchevik to the anthropophagic revolution, and on to 1968. Every revolution that is truly revolutionary must appropriate, sublate and trascend every preceding revolution and strive towards a higher goal. Every new revolution must tell an even greater story than the last, and trace its origins even further back. But it is hard to decide which came first: The revolution, or its origins, the chicken or the egg. This paper attempts to trace a muted, but solidary critique of revolutionary heroism and the totalitarian philosophy of history that is often its corollary, through the works of one of the most important Brazilian authors of the 20th century, Clarice Lispector.

Presented by:
The conference is part of the series “Tropical Underground” and is organized by the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” with the Department of Theatre, Cinema and Media Studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.