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Introduction 1. See Rolena Adorno for similar observations regarding literature treating the colonial period (905, 907–08). Helen Tiffin locates a comparable tendency in other post-colonial contexts, arguing that “the rereading and rewriting of the European historical and fictional record are vital and inescapable tasks” (95). 2. By “colonial films” I mean films set in Latin America’s colonial period. I use this term throughout for the sake of efficiency. 3. I am not the first to characterize cinematic production about the colonial period in terms of cannibalism. See, for example, Williams, Alcides Freire Ramos, and Madureira (Cannibal Modernities). For example , Madureira characterizes Como era gostoso’s relationship to its source text in terms of cannibalization (127). For a concise history of anthropophagy as cultural strategy and the broad-reaching symbolic viability of Andrade’s articulation of it, see João César de Castro Rocha’s essay “Let Us Devour Oswald de Andrade: A Rereading of the Manifesto antropófago ,” the introductory article of “Anthropophagy Today?”, a special issue of Nuevo Texto Crítico, published in 1999. For a more recent re-evaluation of Oswaldian anthropophagy, see Luis Madureira’s incisive 2005 essay “A Cannibal Recipe to Turn a Dessert Country into the Main Course: Brazilian Antropofagia and the Dilemma of Development.” For a re-evaluation of Brazilian modernismo and the part played by Andrade, among others, see Randal Johnson’s insightful articles “Brazilian Modernism: An Idea Out of Place?” (1999) and “Tupy or Not Tupy: Cannibalism and Nationalism in Contemporary Brazilian Literature and Culture” (1987). Regarding the reimergence of cannibalism in 1960s and 1970s Brazil, see, for example, Randal Johnson’s essay “Cinema Novo and Cannibalism: Macunaima” (1995); Stam and Xavier’s “Transformation of National Allegory: Brazilian Cinema from Dictatorship to Redemocratization” (esp. 306–08); and Shohat and Stam’s section “Modernist Anthropophagy,” in Unthinking Eurocentrism (307–12). A fundamental resource for the topic of cannibalism in Latin America in general is Carlos Jáuregui’s groundbreaking book Canibalia: Canibalismo, Calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina [Canibalia: Cannibalism, Cabelism, Cultural Anthropophagy , and Consumption in Latin America] (2008). Now and henceforth, title translations in brackets are my translation. 4. Ella Shohat has called Oswald de Andrade and other Brazilian modernistas “postcolonial hybrids avant la lettre” (135). The results of intercultural contact has been theorized in an array of assessments of Latin American culture originating in Spanish America, Brazil, and the United States that have attempted to describe with no lasting consensus through other sundry permutations of anthropophagy, as well as through concepts such as transculturation, syncretism, hybridity, misplaced ideas, the in-between, mimicry, heterogeneity, and mestizaje/mestiçagem. Notes 197 198 5. Here and henceforth, title translations appearing in brackets are mine. Other title translations are of published editions of the work in question. 6. Andrade turns a cannibalistic eye not only on colonialism, but also on what we might call neo-colonialism. For him and his Brazilian modernista companions, anthropophagy was a way of coming to terms with their emulation of avant-garde Europe while remaining uniquely Brazilian. Rocha signals both the Romantic anticipation of this battle cry of the modernistas—explaining that nineteenth-century novelist José de Alencar “reinstated anthropophagy as an intrinsically positive idea-force” (8)—and the Tropicalist return to anthropophagy in the 1960s and 1970s. With regard to Tropicalism, he writes: “Highly influenced by Modernism, and above all by a national/cosmopolitan dialectic which constituted the core of the Manifesto antropófago, Tropicalism revived anthropophagy” (9). 7. As Shohat and Stam, in Unthinking Eurocentrism, put it in a section on Columbus, “Cinematic recreations of the past reshape the imagination of the present, legitimating or interrogating hegemonic memories and assumptions” (62). 8. A notable exception is Shohat and Stam’s 1994 Unthinking Eurocentrism : Multiculturalism and the Media, which identifies and subdivides a corpus of films about the Conquest in various sections of the book (e.g., “Revisionist Film and the Quincentennial” [71–77] and “Slavery and Resistance” [77–81]). See also Cynthia Leigh-Stone’s brief but informative 1996 article “The Filming of Colonial Spanish America,” which reviews ten films made in and outside Latin America. 9. Useful surveys and filmographies dealing with Latin American films about the colonial period have been produced. In 1994, an important volume was published by the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico: Los mundos del Nuevo Mundo [Worlds of the New World]. The editors, on the back cover of the book, emphasize that their text is intended...