Verde-amarelismo: anthropophagy and racial democracy

Abstract

Still today the myth of racial democracy returns in many discourses as a way to hide or underestimate the effects of racism in Brazil. Consolidated in the 1930’s, the myth has its foundations on the intellectual debates occurred during the 1920’s modernismo and built its hegemony through the formation of consensuses among different, and eventually contradictory, aesthetical and political stances. Considering the dialogues with Verde-amarelismo within the São Paulo 1920’s modernism and the presence of the racial in Revista de Antropofagia, I propose to clarify the relation between these movements and the formation of the myth of racial democracy. The analysis shows how anthropophagy postulates a transparent and selfdetermined subject as a consequence of a cultural trait of the otherwise considered affectable indigenous subject, synchronously transmuted by the continuous absorption of European subjectivity.