ABSTRACT
Scholarly evaluations of artistic primitivism are premised almost exclusively on how practitioners and thinkers from the North Atlantic conceived of non-Western cultures. Historically, the idea of the primitive is presumed to be unidirectional, flowing outwards from the colonizing self to the colonized other. The present chapter focuses on an exception that unsettles the rule. In Brazil, the Antropofagia movement of 1928–1929 put forward a discourse of anti-primitivism, consciously pitting itself against European ethnological perspectives. Antropofagia espoused the principle of embracing the savage but regarded it as something distinct from the primitive. To make sense of that subtle differentiation requires examining the reception of primitivism within a culture largely viewed by European commentators as, itself, “primitive”. A lively and surprisingly complex debate on the subject took place in Brazil, over the 1920s, encompassing primitivism, negrophilia and their relation to modernism. Looking closely at the visual and verbal discourses generated in that context allows us to think about the meanings of artistic primitivism from the vantage point of those it objectified. Such a reversal of perspective may help shift our understanding not only of primitivism but also of the politics of identity and alterity associated with anti-primitivist and anti-colonialist stances.
