In the prologue to his novel Serafim Ponte Grande (1933), Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade wrote: “The modernista movement, which gave way to the ‘anthropophagic’ virus, seemed to indicate an advanced phenomenon. São Paulo possessed a powerful industry. Who could say that the rise of coffee couldn’t bring that semi-colonial, nouveau riche literature to the level of those costly imperialist surrealisms?” How did Latin American artists and writers relate to the profound political and economic changes that took place at the end of the 1920s? This chapter looks at Latin America’s cosmopolitan avant-garde’s rejection, incorporation, or support of the emerging internationalism triggered by the global rise of communism. It does so by examining two events: Diego Rivera’s trips to the Soviet Union and the United States, and the experience of the Brazilian Anthropophagic movement seen from the perspective of Oswald de Andrade’s transformation from cosmopolitan poet to internationalist activist.

The Anthropophagic movement, of 1928-1929, was the most systematic and concerted effort within Brazilian modernism to address the concept of primitivism. Yet, contrary to much that has been written about it and in contrast with other modernist ventures, it largely skirted issues of blackness and Afro-Brazilian identity. The scholarly literature has tended to reduce the movement to Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, and has therefore failed to comprehend its broader scope. The chapter focuses on Antropofagia’s relationship to race and primitivism and discusses the distinction the anthropophagists made between the savage, as a Freudian trope, and the primitive, as an ethnological one. The differing positions of 1920s modernists towards Afro-Brazilian religions and samba are revealing of subtle ideological distinctions. The intersection of class and race became a central concern for communist observers like French poet Benjamin Péret. For writer Mário de Andrade, on the other hand, the quest for autochthonous cultural forms led to a focus on folklore that romanticized ideals of national and racialist identities. The high modernist paradigm, as it eventually took shape after the late 1930s, tended to ignore the needs of subaltern populations or else appropriate them and erase them in favour of a nationalist project.