Oswald de Andrade

José Oswald de Sousa Andrade (São Paulo, 1890 – São Paulo, 1954), known as Oswald de Andrade, was a Brazilian poet, essayist and playwright and one of the central figures of Brazilian modernism. He wrote in Portuguese, and his importance lies in how he reframed Brazil's national culture in relation to its European inheritance.

The only son of a well-off family, he began studying law but soon left it for journalism. In 1909 he became a writer and theatre critic for the Diário Popular, and in 1911, with financial help from his mother, he founded the weekly O Pirralho, which he edited until 1917. Between 1912 and 1913 he travelled through several European countries, and in 1913 he wrote his first play, A recusa.

He played a key role in 1922, when, together with Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, Victor Brecheret and Menotti del Picchia, he helped organise the Modern Art Week at the Teatro Municipal in São Paulo. In 1924 he published the manifesto of the Pau-Brasil group, which championed a primitivist poetics rooted in Brazil's own cultural traditions. In 1928 came the Anthropophagist Manifesto, which argued that colonised countries should absorb the culture of the colonizer and digest it in their own way. Its famous line, "Tupi or not Tupi", captures that idea and doubles as a playful jab at Shakespeare.

His theatre work began in 1934 with O homem e o cavalo, followed by A morta and O rei da vela, both in 1937. The last of these was not staged until thirty years later, when the Teatro Oficina produced it. His public life was contentious: he joined the Communist Party in 1931 and left it, disillusioned, in 1945. His feud with Mário de Andrade, which began in 1929, shaped much of his later career until Mário's death in 1945.

His legacy rests largely on the idea of cultural anthropophagy, which influenced experimental theatre, Tropicália and Cinema Novo. Some critics, including Augusto de Campos and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, regard it as Brazil's most radical artistic movement, while others stress its heterogeneity and its loose connection to any single postcolonial politics.