Brazilian modernism and the Science of Others’ Blood

One of the truly enjoyable aspects of academic research is having the opportunity to work with people in other disciplines. Last year I had the pleasure of co-authoring an essay with Arhaan Gupta-Rastogi from Sacred Heart School in Menlo Park. A budding specialist in computational biology, Arhaan taught me a ton about the science and history of blood transfusion. I got the idea of combining this with Oswald de Andrade’s mention of “blood transfusors” in his 1928 Manifesto antropófago, and we set to work drafting an essay. Several months later, our work has been accepted in a forthcoming issue of Hispania. Here’s the full reference and abstract:

Barletta, Vincent, and Arhaan Gupta-Rastogi. “Oswald de Andrade and the Cannibalist Science of Others’ Blood.” Hispania, vol. 107, no. 4, 2024, forthcoming.   

Abstract: In the present essay, we offer a close examination of Oswald de Andrade’s call for blood transfusers in the Manifesto antropófago (1928). Documenting specific forms of scientific innovation and references to blood transfusion in the broader cultural field, we argue for an approach to the Manifesto that considers Haroldo de Campos’s arguments regarding the national/universal dialectic at the center of Oswald’s text while also addressing more fully the material conditions of anthropophagy and its mediating means. In the end, we link transfusion and transfusores to Oswald’s desire to subvert European and Anglo-American ideas of hybridity and to employ frameworks external to Hegelian dialectic that both engage in post-colonial critique and preserve more robust forms of alterity.