REMINISCENCE OF OSWALDIAN ANTHROPOPHAGIA

Abstract

The Anthropophagic Manifesto of 1928 is the most radical cultural and political manifesto of the early twentieth century in Brazil. From the idea of anthropophagy, Oswald Andrade makes a critical analysis about the Western cultural heritage, whose opposition is directly related to the idea of ​​copying foreign culture to the detriment of the national culture, the copy/original binomial. In the Manifesto, Oswald explores the anthropophagic notion as a metaphor for the transformation of Western culture: swallowing what comes from outside and transforming it into something totally new; absorb the sacred enemy; escape from the dichotomies national/foreign, school/forest. The popularization of Oswaldian anthropophagy only happened from the 1950s onwards, bringing together the concretism of the Campos brothers, Glauber Rocha's and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Cinema Novo, José Celso Martins Corrêa's Oficina Theater, the plastic arts of Hélio Oiticica, until finally ending up in the most popular of these movements: the Tropicália of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. The aim of this article is to explore the anthropophagic thinking of Oswald de Andrade in the Brazilian artistic and cultural scene from the Anthropophagic Manifesto to the Tropicalist Movement, as well as to show evidence of Oswaldian thought in the current Latin American political-cultural debate.