Brazil

Brazil is a country that takes on Carnival from a postmodern and a post-colonial perspective. Although they are strongly influenced from the European version of Carnival, Brazil and other South American countries have been selective about what traditions stick. Shohat and Stam point out, “the Brazilian modernists made the trope of cannibalism the basis of an insurgent aesthetic, calling for a creative synthesis of European avant-gardism and Brazilian ‘cannibalism’ and invoking an ‘anthropophagic’ devouring of the techniques and information of the super-developed countries in order the better to struggle against domination” (49). Carnival has become a forum for Brazilians to take the positive parts of the colonial past while showing their own identity and independence.

Carnival was passed on to South America from colonial times. These countries have the opportunity now to take something white and European and make it something new because “white people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail” (Dyer 9). Brazil has put a new spin on an old tradition and revitalized the event of Carnival.

Carnival can be considered a form of low art, for example “The Afro-diaspor coming from artistically developed African culture but now of freedom, education, and material possibilities, managed to tease beauty out of the very guts of deprivation, whether through the musical use of discarded oil drums (the steel drums of Trinidad), the culinary use of throwaway parts of animals (soul food, feijoada), or the use in weaving of throwaway fabrics (quilting)” (Shohat and Stam 52). These would not work next to high art of the opera and ballet. Carnival embraces and celebrates low art. Homemade costumes and homemade food are strongly embedded in the Carnival tradition.