Cannibalizing The Colony

Richard A. Gordon, The Ohio State University, works in the areas of Hispanic and Portuguese language literatures, cultures and film studies, and comparative studies. His research intersects with colonial and post-colonial studies, centering on Brazilian and Spanish-American historical cinema. He is currently writing a book that evaluates the role that films about slavery have played in shaping national identities in Cuba and Brazil. His articles have appeared in Hispania, MLN, Luso-Brazilian Review, Letras Peninsulares, Colonial Latin American Review, and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

Romance Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1, 66--69, 2013 Richard Gordon.Cannibalizing the Colony.Purdue: Purdue University Press, 2009. 264 pp. As the author affirms in the introduction, Brazil and Mexico are perhaps the countries with a richer legacy regarding the visual representation of colonial literature and colonial culture in the screen. The films chosen as corpus for this study go from a classic early sound feature like Humberto Mama's Descobrimento do Brasil (1937) to a digital post-cinema production like Caramuru (2002), directed by Guel Arraes. The other two films for Brazil include a classic of the late era of Cinema Novo, Nelson Pereira DosSantos' Como era Gostoso o Meu Frances (1971), inspired on Hans Staden's testimonial of captivity vVarhaftige Historia (1557), and a fictional recreation of colonial contact between Portuguese and Tupf peoples, Lucia Murat's Brava Gente Brasileira released in 2000. On the Mexican side the chronology of the works covered is less encompassing but definitively pertinent to the subject and vision of the book. The earliest work studied is the controversial film Nuevo Mundo (1976), directed by Gabriel Retes. The most recent is a fictional reconstruction of seventeen century convent life focusing on a female poet and thinker (not unlike Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz), Ave Marfa, directed by Eduardo Rossof ( 1999). The other two Mexican productions studied include the expensive and long adaptation of the Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca chronicle Naufragios (1542) in the first fiction film of documentarian Nicolas Echevarrfa, Cabeza de Vaca (1991), and Salvador Carrasco's Spanish-Mexican coproduction La Otra Conquista (1998). These eight films are analyzed according to a set of interesting methodological strategies. First, "cannibalism" is used as an encompassing metaphor central to the creation of cultural artifacts and cultural identities in Latin America in general and, as Gordon argues, especially relevant for Brazil