Anthropophagic Movement

The Anthropophagic Movement, or Antropofagia, was a Brazilian modernist cultural and literary movement launched in 1928 by the poet and polemicist Oswald de Andrade with his Manifesto Antropofago, or Cannibalist Manifesto, published in the Revista de Antropofagia, which Oswald co-founded with Raul Bopp and Antonio de Alcantara Machado, and inspired in part by Tarsila do Amaral's painting Abaporu. The manifesto's central metaphor held that Brazil, a colonized country, should devour and creatively digest foreign cultural influence rather than either rejecting it outright or imitating it submissively, turning the historical European stereotype of the cannibalistic New World native into an assertive metaphor for Brazilian cultural independence and self-invention. Written in dense, aphoristic poetic prose, the Anthropophagic Manifesto became a foundational and still widely cited document of Brazilian Modernism, and its central metaphor of cultural cannibalism has continued to influence Brazilian and broader Latin American thinking about cultural identity, influence and postcolonial appropriation well beyond the movement's own brief institutional life in the late 1920s.