Anthropophagic Appropriation and Intermediality

The concept of anthropophagic appropriation or cultural anthropophagy was formulated by the Brazilian Modernist poet and thinker Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto Antropófago in 1928. The notion derives from the anthropophagic rituals of the Tupinambá Indians, who used to devour their enemies to appropriate their intelligence, wisdom, and power. In this light, Andrade’s inventive avant-garde theory, translated as Cannibalist Manifesto, by Leslie Bary, encourages the ritual consumption of foreign artistic manifestations and its fusion with native Brazilian traditions and national themes. This act of ingestion, deglutition, and digestion represents a radical departure from the oppositional binary relations of self and other, allowing the incorporation into the self of what is most excellent in the other to generate something new and distinctly Brazilian. Andrade anticipated important theoretical perspectives on adaptation, appropriation, and transculturation, creative processes which only much later were articulated, according to different perspectives, by poststructuralist and postcolonialist critics. In this sense, he is an important forerunner, whose insights have been readdressed and reconceptualized on a global scale in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Considering that the concepts of adaptation and appropriation, which intersect and interrelate at many junctures, have been considered part of the broader scholarly fields of intertextuality (Sanders, Adaptation and appropriation. London/New York: Routledge, 2006) and intermediality (Elleström, Adaptation and Intermediality. In The Oxford handbook of adaptation studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 509–526. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017), in the present chapter, I argue that anthropophagic appropriation or cultural anthropophagy is a form of creative non-subaltern intertextuality and that, seen from a diachronic perspective, it is a specific mode of media transformation or transmediation that can be located within the broader scholarly field of intermediality.