Who devours whom? Cultural anthropophagy, colonial asymmetries, and Latin American art

Abstract

This critical essay examines the historical significance of Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928) in shaping a non-subordinate Latin American cultural modernity. It also argues for its relevance in contemporary debates on the global city, gentrification, and the decolonial turn. Thus, it proposes reading anthropophagy less as a generic celebration of mixing and more as a situated method of critical incorporation—that is, a way of challenging hierarchies of value when culture is produced under persistent colonial asymmetries.

Drawing on notions of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), modernity/coloniality (Mignolo, 2011), and hybridization (García Canclini, 1990), the text argues that anthropophagy is productive only if it becomes self-critical. In other words, it must distinguish between translations that reorder hierarchies and translations that recycle difference as style or commodity. At the level of practices, the essay discusses examples from the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Hélio Oiticica’s Tropicália, the 24th São Paulo Biennial, Andrea Bandoni’s Pixo project, and, as a counterpoint, Adriana Varejão. Emphasis is placed on how stigmatized urban writing can become a domestic object and, in doing so, reveal tensions between visibility and institutional appropriation. The essay concludes that anthropophagy remains a tool against racial, cultural, and disciplinary purism, but its power depends on recognizing institutional mediations, as well as the economies of visibility that ultimately determine who devours whom.