Cannibalizing the Colony: Cinematic Adaptations of Colonial Literature in Mexico and Brazil(Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 45)

The years 1992 and 2000 marked the 500-year anniversary of the arrival of the Spanish and the Portuguese in America and prompted an explosion of rewritings and cinematic renditions of texts and figures from colonial Latin America. Cannibalizing the Colony analyzes a crucial way that Latin American historical films have grappled with the legacy of colonialism. It studies how and why filmmakers in Brazil and Mexico—the countries that have produced most films about the colonial period in Latin America—appropriate and transform colonial narratives of European and indigenous contact into commentaries on national identity. The book looks at how filmmakers attempt to reconfigure history and culture and incorporate it into present-day understandings of the nation. The book additionally considers the motivations and implications for these filmic dialogues with the past and how the directors attempt to control the way that spectators understand the complex and contentious roots of identity in Mexico and Brazil.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
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