Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature

Unique in its inclusion of Brazil in a comparative study of literary texts and their engagement with Western modernity, ""Cannibal Modernities"" is the first post colonial study to show how the ""peripheral"" replications of modernity in contemporary Caribbean and Latin American texts differ crucially from their European models. Luis Madureira addresses issues that so many post colonial theorists have struggled with, particularly the complex interactions and antagonisms between indigenous cultures and the imperial cultures imposed upon them and the effort to ""provincialize the West."" Madureira's book diverges from existing critical texts, however, in crucial, thought-provoking ways. The specific literary traditions compared here - Brazilian modernism, negritude theory and poetry, as well as Caribbean literary theory and historical discourses in French, English, and Spanish - have not been brought together in a single study before. In addition, the book's theoretical model of comparison focuses on the complexities of colonial and post colonial identity and of nationhood and globalization, as well as on their agonistic engagement with Europe's enlightenment philosophy. ""Cannibal Modernities"" shows us it is precisely in those New World avant-garde movements that have been traditionally designated as imitative that the emergence of post-coloniality resides and, moreover, that Europe's foundational discourses of modernity are enabled and sustained by the very peoples and cultures that have been relegated to the margins by modernity.