Nelson Pereira dos Santos's 1971 film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is a strategic allegory for colonial and imperialist resistance, as well as a metatextual declaration of Brazilian national cinema. In the spirit of Oswald de Andrade's “Manifesto Antropofago,” dos Santos uses European encounters with the Tupinambá as an allegory for neocolonial invasions, embracing cannibalism not only as subject matter, but also as an artistic sensibility. The film adapts various source materials, principally German adventurer Hans Staden's 1556 captivity narrative, and is generally celebrated for undermining the stability of historical narratives. However, this paper argues that How Tasty remains a re-vision of an illusion, one notably devoid of a Native referent.
“Profile Epistemologies, Racializing Surveillance, and Affective Counterstrategies in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen” contextualizes contemporary data profiling and social sorting within the history of racial discrimination, surveillance, and biometrics. Through close readings of Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, the article explores the ideologies inherent in a supposedly neutral profile epistemology, which maintains, for example, that “data speaks for itself” and that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Linking the truth claims of data surveillance to histories of racial profiling and respectability politics, it analyzes how profile epistemology remains dependent on white supremacy, demonstrating how critical race theory, affect theory, and poetry can open up forms of oppositional looking to undermine the ostensible objectivity of data.
This essay analyzes increasingly ubiquitous data collection and posits that metafiction is especially well suited to grapple with the significance of metadata and data surveillance, given its own preoccupation with watching itself watch. Making a critical intervention in the historically male-centered canon of US metafiction, Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) conscientiously engages the power relations of watching. In the background of the novel and at its chronological center are the 9/11 attacks and also, incidentally, the launch of the iPod. In a sense, these two events structure the novel’s investments in data surveillance. Moreover, to the extent that the novel’s form mirrors a musical album it also forms a network of characters, speaking to the constellation of forces that not only convert analog recordings into digital data, but also translate relationships, habits, and subjectivity into metadata.
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