Jamille Pinheiro Dias (Manchester): "On Coalition and Cosmopolitics: Notes for a Recent History of Indigenous Cultural Production in Brazil"
| Dates: | 16 February 2022 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Jamille Pinheiro Dias |
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Part of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series 2020/21.
This event will be on campus (Samuel Alexander A101) but you can also follow it via Zoom. Here is the link: https://zoom.us/j/94462492930
In Brazil, the combined legacies of slavery and dictatorship, along with a persistent developmentalist rhetoric and the fallacy of racial democracy, remain entrenched in elite and popular opinion, inciting the mindset that sustains predatory agribusiness, illegal mining and anti-Indigenous racism. Against this backdrop, I will trace a recent historical arc to consider how Indigenous self-representation in cultural production in the country has been mobilising repertoires of aesthetic resistance over the last ten years. My entry point is the letter in which the Guarani Kaiowá from the Pyelito Kue and Mbarakay communities addressed the Brazilian Federal Court in 2012, resisting an eviction order and stating that they would rather be killed and buried in their lands with their ancestors than leave. I continue by looking at The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Davi Kopenawa’s and Bruce Albert’s pedagogical intervention and warning to non-Indigenous readerships, published in Brazil in 2015. Even with his distrust of writing as a medium, which he sees as marked by forgetfulness and greed, Kopenawa made the choice to have his words “drawn” by Albert in the language of White people, so that the Yanomami could be heard beyond the forest for generations. I then echo a debate between Ailton Krenak and the late Jaider Esbell, two leading figures in Indigenous cultural production in Brazil, at the opening of the Moquém_Surarî: arte indígena contemporânea exhibition, held in 2021 at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. I end by expanding on their discussion of the consequences of approaching “Indigenous art” as a form of “cosmopolitics” or “coalition”, and suggesting that Indigenous cultural production may be better understood not as based on a unified standpoint or generic identity, but on notions of “culture” and “art” that remain contingent, open to question and negotiation.
Speaker
Jamille Pinheiro Dias
Role: Research Associate
Organisation: School of Social Sciences, University of Manchestert
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A101
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
