Mexendo nos Caetés: Graciliano e os fetiches do discurso pós-colonial

The essay approaches the novel Caetés (1933) by Graciliano Ramos around a century after the constitution of a dense critical tradition. The novel continues to maintain plenty of interpretive challenges, with the potential of being a critical device, structured on contrasting figures that, at the level of the literary form, show the complex functioning of an otherwise problematically representable Brazilian modernity. One of the crucial figures for modernity, the shipwreck, is read in contrast to another more consecrated device of the critical dismantling of Brazil: Oswaldo de Andrade’s “anthropophagy”. Precisely in the connection of different historical times, the still strong lesson of the novel is projected into the horizon of the readings of opaque colonial times, highlighting risks on the context of the supposedly “postcolonial” discourse which, without an adequate critical ground, ends up subscribing to the coloniality implied by the actual agency of power. The text thus becomes an effective aesthetic and critical battleground