AVANT-GARDE IN LATIN AMERICA: MANUEL BANDEIRA IN THE UNIVERSAL LOCALISM

Abstract

Aiming to reflect on the avant-garde movements from a continental perspective, this paper analyzes the specificities of the Modern Movement in Latin America from a local and universal perspective (Candido, 2006), which is a differentiation factor in terms of European modernism. With the Latin American continent as a subject, but concentrating on a specific Brazilian author, we will analyze this process based on the Brazilian writer Manuel Bandeira’s chronicles. They were written along with the 1920s and 1930s and selected for the book Crônicas da Província do Brasil [Chronicles of the Province of Brazil, our translation], from 1937. We will articulate the chronicles with the author’s path and some modern movements, both in Brazil and on the continent. Bandeira’s texts are a powerful source of analysis and understanding of universal Latin American localism. They allow us to understand aspects of this movement, which was not specific to Brazil but spread throughout Latin America, and how it could reflect in our language, architecture, cities, and culture. Such reflections highlight how this path is still being taken, how geographic, literature, and language barriers are being overcome in Latin America.