Underground Relations: Extractivism and Modernism in Brazilian Literature

Tomaz Amorim (Mecila, São Paulo, Brazil)

12:00-13:00

This lecture explores the intersection of extractivism and modernism in early 20th-century Brazilian literature, emphasizing how extractivism shapes the country’s cultural and aesthetic landscape. It argues that extractivism is not merely an economic activity but is deeply embedded in Brazil’s social fabric, influencing perceptions of space and leaving a profound imprint on its art history. The concept of «underground relations» is used to highlight how extractivism and modernism converge in peripheral contexts, where the archaic and the modern coexist, producing a unique form of Third World Modernism. The lecture draws on theoretical frameworks such as Maristella Svampa’s «extractivism and neo-extractivism» and Macarena Gómez-Barris’s «extractivist gaze,» emphasizing the role of global economic chains and the hidden dimensions of modernization in shaping aesthetic responses to extractivism.
Through the works of Oswald de Andrade and Euclides da Cunha, the lecture examines how literature reflects and critiques the complexities of extractivism. Andrade’s “Pau-Brasil” poetry book is analyzed for its montage technique, which mirrors extractivist processes, and its representation of slavery as human resource extraction. The work is also framed within the colonial legacy of São Paulo modernism and its «poetics of coffee,» which both celebrate and critique coffee plantations’ role in São Paulo’s industrialization. In contrast, Euclides da Cunha’s “At the Margins of History” offers a perspective shaped by his developmentalist and positivist views, tempered by a growing awareness of extractivism’s destructive impact, particularly in his vivid descriptions of rubber extraction and the Amazon River in the beginning of the 20th century.
The lecture advocates for understanding infrastructure as more than physical systems, presenting them as cultural and literary constructs that shape human engagement with extractive spaces. By incorporating Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian perspectives, it offers a critical narrative on the intersections of aesthetics, extraction, and historical justice in Brazilian literature.

Tomaz Amorim holds a bachelor’s degree in Literary Studies and a master’s degree in Literary Theory from Unicamp. He was a master’s scholar in the «Albertus Magnus Program» at the University of Cologne in Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from USP, with a research exchange fellowship at Humboldt University of Berlin. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Literary Theory and History at Unicamp, where he studied non-modern intersections between the works of Oswald de Andrade and Walter Benjamin. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cluster of Excellence «Temporal Communities». Currently, he is the Academic Coordinator of Mecila (Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America), where he also conducts research on Modernism and Extractivism in Latin America. He has published scholarly articles, poetry books, and literary translations. In 2024, he published the literary criticism book Arquipélago: Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea (2013-2023).