Anthropophagia

Anthropophagia literally means cannibalism, the eating of a human being, but as an artistic term it is associated above all with Brazilian modernism. The concept derives from the Cannibalist Manifesto (Manifesto Antropófago) published by the writer Oswald de Andrade in 1928. The metaphor of cultural cannibalism proposed a strategy by which Brazilian culture should devour European influences, absorb them and transform them into something new and distinctive rather than passively copying colonial models. The idea drew on the image of indigenous peoples who ritually ate an enemy in order to take on his strength. In art it was vividly embodied by the painter Tarsila do Amaral, notably in the painting Abaporu (1928), which inspired the manifesto itself. Later, in the 1960s, anthropophagia became the conceptual basis of the Tropicália movement, which spanned music, film and the visual arts; its representatives, though rooted in Brazil, deliberately drew influences from Europe and America, digesting them into a hybrid national form. Anthropophagia remains an influential concept in postcolonial theory about cultural identity and appropriation.