Indigenous ecopoetics as post-human emancipation: notes on the representation of the self-other in the era of degradation

Abstract

Not only as an art that historically faces domination, but as one that is reborn from centuries of oppression and integrates ancestral cosmogonies, indigenous literature carries an ethical and ecopolitical commitment, strengthened by decolonial ecocriticism and post-anthropocentric post-humanist thought (Braidotti, 2013). It is, therefore, doubly engaged, aesthetically and ideologically, in an ontological and ecosophical vision, producing, in the Anthropocene era, new ways of seeing and perceiving. Based on the above, this study looks into the contemporary Brazilian indigenous poetic production, more specifically that of the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, based on the natureculture overlap (Haraway, 2003). We aim to analyze the modes of literary representation in the face of the humanitarian crisis confronted by indigenous peoples in recent years due to the pandemic and anthropogenic actions, taking as a starting point the works by Trudruá Dorrico and Eliane Potiguara. Based on these discussions, we seek to understand abya yala aesthetics as a political-literary path for reconstructing bien vivir as an ancestral practice and a cry for socio-environmental justice, integrating, in this journey, alternative social existence (Quijano, 2014), epistolary writing, and poetic resistance.

Keywords:
indigenous literature; contemporary Brazilian poetry; ecocriticism; natureculture