T. S. Eliot:The Waste Land

Decolonising Responses to ‘Engaged Art’: Disposability and Neoimperialism in Art, Activism and Academia

“…As such, it is also highly inaccessible and requires an encyclopaedic understanding of European literary history dating back to the sixteenth century. As John Haffenden notes, it is a ‘piece of elitist eclecticism appealing principally to those who appear to have access, like Eliot, to a swathe of European literary history’ (Haffenden 2001: 381). By juxtaposing the use of intertextuality in Eliot's poem and Muniz's photoseries – a comparison evoked in the documentary's title, in particular for an anglophone audience engaging with the documentary in an academic context – one may identify how the latter's use of allusion appeals to a certain group's elitism (auction houses, galleries and academics), to serve another group's material needs (the catadores) by substantially providing them important financial support.…”