This lecture is part of the 2022 Autumn Art Lecture series: 

Modernisms: Decolonising art's history

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About the Autumn Art Lectures

This year’s Autumn Art Lectures are back in person to challenge the concept of Modernism as a monolithic entity: Is there just one Modernism or are there many? What does it mean to think of Modernism on the global stage? Is there such a thing as an ‘alternative’ Modernism or is Modernism itself already inherently hybrid? As many institutions, from galleries and museums to universities, engage with the challenges of embracing global visual culture, this investigation is both vital and timely. Our inter-disciplinary speakers include academics, curators, artists and pedagogues who have grappled with the idea of the Modern, paying particular attention to blackness, Asian-ness, difference and decolonisation. The series aims to expose diversity at the heart of the Modern.

The Autumn Art Lecture series is hosted by the University of Bristol's Faculty of Arts with support from the Centre for Black Humanities and Bristol Ideas.

About this event

1922 was not only a pivotal year in European Modernism, it was also a landmark moment for Modernism in Brazil. In February of that year, as Ulysses was published in Europe, the Brazilian Week of Modern Art placed the country firmly in the international spotlight, not least for the critical opposition that it provoked. The presence of artists who had studied in Europe or emigrated from there laid the ground for important relationships between Brazilian artists and their European counterparts. However, the most important Brazilian impact was felt through the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, the poet Oswald de Andrade and the painter Tarsila do Amaral. The fruits of their experience – Villa-Lobos's Parisian concerts, Oswald’s ‘Cannibal Manifesto’ and Tarsila’s canvas ‘Abaporu’ – are the principal legacy of this decisive moment. This lecture takes its cue from Oswald, using ‘cannibalism’ as a route into the fluid situation of hybridity and incorporation that marks out the Brazilian strand of Modernism.

Professor Jackson’s digital lecture will be screened live with an in-person introduction and moderated discussion led by Dr Rebecca Kosick, Senior Lecturer in Translation/Co-Director Poetry Institute, University of Bristol, who will also facilitate the Q&A with the audience.

About the speaker 

Kenneth David Jackson is professor of Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures at Yale University. He specialises in Portuguese and Brazilian literatures, modernist movements in literature and other arts, Portuguese literature and culture in Asia, poetry, music, and ethnography. Among his books are Cannibal Angels: Transatlantic Modernism and the Brazilian Avant-Garde; Machado de Assis: A Literary Life; Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa, and the CD-ROM Luis de Camões and the First Edition of The Lusiads, 1572. He has conducted field research in Sri Lanka and India, was a Fulbright lecturer in Brazil and has performed as a cellist in several professional orchestras and a string quartet.

Tickets

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Check out the other events in the Autumn Art Lecture series: https://bit.ly/3EFba8r