Sassan Tabatabai

Cannibalizing the Colony: Cinematic Adaptations of Colonial Literature in Mexico and Brazil - Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 45 Sassan Tabatabai

The years 1992 and 2000 marked the 500-year anniversary of the arrival of the Spanish and the Portuguese in America and prompted an explosion of rewritings and cinematic renditions of texts and figures from colonial Latin America. Cannibalizing the Colony analyzes a crucial way that Latin American historical films have grappled with the legacy of colonialism. It studies how and why filmmakers in Brazil and Mexico-the countries that have produced most films about the colonial period in Latin America-appropriate and transform colonial narratives of European and indigenous contact into commentaries on national identity.