Oswald de Andrade, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Oswald de Andrade

Brazilian poet, writer

Date of Birth: 11-Jan-1890

Place of Birth: São Paulo, Brazil

Date of Death: 22-Oct-1954

Profession: writer, poet, playwright, journalist, novelist, non-fiction writer, pamphleteer

Nationality: Brazil

Zodiac Sign: Capricorn

José Oswald de Souza Andrade (January 11, 1890 – October 22, 1954) was a Brazilian poet and polemicist.
He was born and spent most of his life in São Paulo. Andrade was one of the founders of Brazilian modernism and a member of the Group of Five, along with Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral and Menotti del Picchia.
He participated in the Week of Modern Art (Semana de Arte Moderna). Andrade is very important too for his manifesto of critical Brazilian nationalism, Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto), published in 1928.
Its argument is that Brazil's history of "cannibalizing" other cultures is its greatest strength, while playing on the modernists' primitivist interest in cannibalism as an alleged tribal rite.
Cannibalism becomes a way for Brazil to assert itself against European postcolonial cultural domination.
The Manifesto's iconic line is "Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question." The line is simultaneously a celebration of the Tupi, who had been at times accused of cannibalism (most notoriously by Hans Staden), and an instance of cannibalism: it eats Shakespeare.
On the other hand, some critics argue that Antropofagia, as a movement, was too heterogeneous to extract overarching arguments from it and that often it had little to do with a post-colonial cultural politics (Jauregui 2018, 2012)