Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagy” is a theory proposing the critical devouring of universal cultural heritage, formulated not from the submissive and reconciled perspective of the “noble savage” (idealized following the model of European virtues in the “nativist” vein of Brazilian romanticism by authors such as Gonçalves Dias and José de Alencar, for example), but from the disabused point of view of the “bad savage,” devourer of whites, the cannibal. This last view does not involve submission (conversion) but, rather, transculturation, or, even better, “transvalorization”: a critical view of history as a negative function (in Nietzsche’s sense), capable of appropriation and of expropriation, of dehierarchization, of deconstruction. Any past which is an “other” for us deserves to be negated. We could even say, it deserves to be eaten, devoured, with the following clarifying proviso: The cannibal was a “polemicist” (from the Greek polemos, meaning “struggle, combat”), but he was also an “anthologist”—he devoured only the enemies he considered courageous, taking their marrow and protein to fortify and renew his own natural energies.
Haroldo de Campos, "Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture"
