Literature and Development on the Occasion of the Anthropocene

Abstract

The article aims to analyze Antonio Candido’s “Literatura e subdesenvolvimento” (1970) through the reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). In his book, Chakrabarty seeks to understand the motivations of mid-20th century anti-colonial leaders in their fight for local development. His analysis, according to our reading, consists of a way of bringing the Anthropocene and its problematics close to postcolonial criticism and indicating the limits of Third World desires for modernization in times of climate change. “Literatura e subdesenvolvimento”, in this sense, reveals the ambitions of one of the most important Brazilian cultural critics. By claiming literary, political and economic dependence, Antonio Candido expresses the modernizing aspirations of an entire generation. Our aim is to bring out the modernizing project that the text insinuates with the aid of postcolonial theory and to question its methods in the face of the Anthropocene.