Anthropophagic parody and/as decolonial critique: Verissimo, Shakespeare, and literary devouring

This article explores the decolonizing potential of anthropophagic parody in A décima segunda noite (2006), by Luis Fernando Verissimo, a novel that reimagines Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night through Oswald de Andrade’s concept of cultural anthropophagy. By transposing the play into a Brazilian setting, the novel subverts the hierarchical centrality of Shakespeare in the Western canon. The parrot-narrator, Henri, embodies this process by mimicking and distorting Shakespeare’s text in a carnivalesque dialogue that both honors and critiques its source. Engaging with post-colonial and literary theorists such as Walter Mignolo and Linda Hutcheon, the article argues that anthropophagic parody enacts epistemic disobedience, allowing a Brazilian writer to appropriate and reconfigure Shakespeare’s legacy. Through linguistic, narrative, and thematic disruptions, A décima segunda noite illustrates how anthropophagic parody can dismantle colonial epistemologies, demonstrating the subversive potential of Brazilian literature to engage critically with global cultural traditions while asserting its own creative agency.