Antropofagia: Cultural Cannibalization
Tropicália was part of the larger umbrella of Tropicálismo that encompassed a broad social artistic movement informed by theories of cultural cannibalism or antropofagia. Taken from Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Anthropophagous Manifesto, The process of “cannibalization” was key to the movement. Across a range of media, these artists “cannibalized” materials, ideas, and cultural artefacts as acts of creation. They drew on varied influences including the surrealists of the 1920s, musique concrète, and concrete poetry (Perrone 1985). Playing on the mélange of different media, Tropicália amalgamated artistic innovations across multiple modalities sparking different sensory perceptions. For example, the song “Bat Macumba” plays on phonemes as well as disassembling and reassembling syllables from two words “bat” and “macumba” rather than linguistically based lyrics. In written form, the contours of the lyrics formed the shape of bat wings. This visual effect has been interpreted as a critical reference to the American superhero Batman symbolizing North America (de Amorim Neto and de Castro Rocha 2020 [retrieved]). The term “macumba” is taken from Afro-Brasileiro religious practice with positive connotations; by contrast, non-adherents have also colonized the term negatively in ways that indicate bias. Cannibalizing all of these meanings together, “Bat Macumba” provides an excellent example of Tropicália’s spirit of melding and redefinition. Tropicália was not in isolation but part of the larger artistic movement that used new aesthetics across media and modalities to protest the military regime.
The movement’s name came from the art installation by Hélio Oiticica in 1967 entitled “Tropicália” (Canejo 2004). The neologism Tropicália was then borrowed to name the genre of music, its iconic album, and ultimately the musical movement. The very way in which Tropicália derived its name via cannibalization underscored the movement’s ties to Andrade’s work. His manifesto advocated cannibalization as an act of creation that subsumes the other rather than simply rejecting it. In this way, cannibalization as a form of resistance across multiple fronts became the vehicle through which dominance was confronted and potentially transformed. For example, Andrade’s Manifesto adopted the phrase “Tupi or not tupi.” Employing this expression implicitly spoke to dominance and power differentials by playing on a concoction of Shakespeare and the name of the now-extinct lingua franca spoken by some of Brazil’s first peoples. This juxtaposition did several things. First, it pointed to Brazilian culture as a unique mélange of many factors in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Second, it elevated the continual (re)production and (re)birth of Brazilian culture and, at the same time, rejected a vision of Brazil as subaltern to European colonization or subordinate to Anglophone hegemony. Third, it indicated how resistance is communicated by implication and nuance that audiences needed to be willing to hear.
