a Paulista journal, published between 1941 and 1944 by the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo, in which Antonio Candido participated.
19 19 This series of interviews was accompanied by another with the representatives of the older generation (fundamentally the modernists of different veins), which was published with the tombstone‐like title Testament of a Generation. See Cavalheiro, E . (1944). Testamento de uma geração. Porto Alegre: Globo.
20 20 Or further, “The old ones take the wide road, while the youngsters go through the ‘narrow door’” (p. 119).
21 21 The Intentona Comunista was an attempted 1935 coup against the government of Getúlio Vargas. It was led by the Aliança Nacional Libertatora, an antifascist, popular front political organization, with the support of the Brazilian Communist Party and the Comintern.
22 22 On Brasília and Juscelino Kubitschek, see Fabiola López‐Durán, Chapter 9 in this volume.
23 23 See Alambert, F., and Lopes, P.C. (2004). Bienais de São Paulo: Da era do museu à era dos curadores. São Paulo: Boitempo.
24 24 Concretismo, a Brazilian arts movement arising in the 1950s, emphasized geometric abstraction based on rationalist principles. On Concretismo, see Juan Ledezma, Chapter 8 in this volume.
25 25 Tropicalismo (also known as Tropicália) was an arts movement that emerged in the late 1960s, critical of the Brazilian dictatorship. See Irene Small, Chapter 13 in this volume. Influenced by Antropofagia, it was perhaps most well known for its innovative music blending Brazilio‐African rhythms with rock, and for musicians such as Caetano Veloso. Tropicalismo also includes visual arts, poetry, and theater, in which artists such as Hélio Oiticica combined avant‐garde art and popular cultural forms.
26 26 Mário de Andrade published his novel, Macunaíma, considered one of the founding texts of Brazilian modernism, in 1928.
References
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3 de Andrade, M. (1974). O movimento modernista. In: Aspectos da literatura brasileira, 252. São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editora.
4 Arantes, O. (1997). Lúcio Costa e a “boa causa” da arquitetura moderna. In: Sentido da formação (ed. O. Arantes and P.E. Arantes), 113–133. São Paulo: Paz e Terra.
5 Buarque de Holanda, S. (1996). O lado oposto e outros lados. In: O espírito e a letra. Estudos de crítica literária I, 1920–1947 (ed. A.A. Prado), 224–228. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
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16 Salles Gomes, P.E. (1986). Paulo Emílio: Plataforma da nova geração. In: Paulo Emílio: Um intelectual na linha de frente (ed. C.A. Calil and M. Teresa Machado), 82–85. São Paulo: Brasiliense.
3 José Carlos Mariátegui and the Eternal Dawn of Revolution
Martín Oyata
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José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) is the great unknown in Latin American intellectual history. Widely regarded as one of the continent's finest thinkers, his ideas nonetheless prove hard to grasp, as they resist those pithy formulas that make for accessible surveys. Whereas Domingo Faustino Sarmiento is remembered for the dichotomy “civilization or barbarism,” José Enrique Rodó for his odes to the Latin spirit, and José Vasconcelos for his theory of the “cosmic race,” Mariátegui seems a more elusive, if not esoteric, thinker.
Standard accounts resort to the established facts of his biography. Thus we are typically told that he was born in Peru, was a self‐taught intellectual, founded the Peruvian Socialist Party, launched one of the foremost avant‐garde reviews of the continent – the legendary Amauta – and died quite young, at the age of 35. We are also told that he devoted much of his efforts to writing about modern art, arguing for the compatibility of Marxism and nationalism, and, above all, calling for an indigenist understanding of Marxism. But what does this amount to? What, if anything, ties these strands together?
The first thing to note is that Mariátegui was fundamentally a man of letters and a man of his times. His friend, the eminent historian Jorge Basadre, once described him as a journalist, a remark that, although perhaps condescending, is not in fact unfair. For Mariátegui's oeuvre is almost entirely composed of short articles, occasional pieces of writing that allowed him to perfect a vigorous and attractively readable style (and make a living as well), but can seem too episodic and too dependent on current affairs for the present‐day reader. Even his more organic book, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 1926), lacks any grand design. But such fragmentariness does not result exclusively from the pressing conditions under which Mariátegui – always up against the clock – forged his ideas; it is the mode of thought that he consciously favored and proudly embraced, as the Nietzsche epigraph with which Seven Essays begins makes sufficiently clear: “I intend never again to read an author of whom it is apparent that he wanted to produce a book: but only those whose thoughts unintentionally became a book” (Nietzsche 1986, p. 339). Nothing was more alien to Mariátegui's mind than the desire for building systems or prescribing methods.
This rejection of stuffy academicism comes through especially strongly in his writings on artistic matters. Not only did Mariátegui favor commentary on particular works and artists instead of well‐rounded aesthetic theories, but he also discussed literature and painting, or sculpture and film, as if there were no formal or methodological distinctions to be made between those realms. It would be unwise to