Get the latest tech news

Cannibal Modernity: Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago (1928)

A modernist manifesto inspired (controversially) by the Tupi people of Brazil.

It is a riotous origin myth for his country that rivals Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published a few months later, in its games with gender fluidity, and adds its own episodes of racial slippage for good measure, presenting an ideal of a multiracial Brazil where the Indigenous population, those of African heritage descended from enslaved people, and those with colonial European blood might be equivalent. The Manifesto expectedly name-checks Freud ( Totem and Taboo) and William James ( The Varieties of Religious Experience), but also Serge Voronoff, the briefly celebrated surgeon who transplanted monkey testicles into his rich clients with the promise that it would slow the ageing process, gently suggesting that old Europe was not without its own cannibalistic tendencies. For others, however, the sentiments expressed in the Manifesto retain their potency nearly a hundred years on, both as a jesting provocation amid pious current arguments about cultural appropriation, and perhaps, too, as a comment on the recent orgy of political and environmental autophagy in Brazil itself.

Get the Android app