The American Portuguese Studies Association proposes a non-guaranteed session on visibilities of Indigenous peoples in Brazil. This focus on how literature, culture, film, and visual art represent Indigenous Brazilians will consider how increased visibility in cultural fields affect political, social, and economic issues. The session examines representations of these Amerindians by Argentine-Brazilian filmmakers, North American documentary filmmakers, Brazilian playwrights, and Indigenous artists. This interdisciplinary and transnational approach will allow invite a deeper understanding of how the visibility of Indigenous peoples in Brazil is mediated through artistic, journalistic, and other audiovisual formats. These processes of mediation influence which Amerindians are visible, to what extent and in which ways they are visible, and to whom they are visible. While documentary often aims to render Indigenous lives visible and legible, more poetic forms and experimental artistic expressions challenge this apparent visibility by underscoring invisibility or opaqueness. By considering representations of Amerindians in Brazil, the panel will explore the possibilities and limitations of Indigenous visibility in Brazil, which dialogues with the 2025 Presidential Theme, “Visibility.”

This session will allow scholars of Lusophone literature and culture to approach Indigenous visibilities from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. The topic of Indigenous representation and expression has become more pressing in Brazil recently, especially as Indigenous peoples’ territories and well-being have been threatened by climate change, deforestation, and public health catastrophes. With these heightened political stakes, more scholarly and artistic attention has turned toward Indigenous peoples. The writings of Ailton Krenak have circulated within Brazil and have been translated into English, Spanish, and other languages. The collaboration of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa with French anthropologist Bruce Albert in The Falling Sky has amplified the Yanomami ideas and concepts. Similarly, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s theorizing of multinaturalist Amerindian perspectivism helps to disseminate Indigenous ideas to readers of Portuguese, French, and English. These writings exist alongside an emerging body of Indigenous literature and artistic expression, which has begun to circulate increasingly in Brazil and to garner attention with gallery and museum exhibitions. Over the past year, the exhibits of “The Yanomami Struggle” at the Shed in New York, Denilson Baniwá at the Pinacoteca in São Paulo, and “Indigenous Histories” at the MASP in São Paulo have drawn renewed attention to Amerindian visual cultures and visibilities within gallery spaces. The panelists in this session will contribute to these important current debates.

The session will consist of four presentations of 12 to 14-minutes each, allowing for at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion at the end of the session. The session presider will keep introductions short and carefully document the time to ensure this period of conversation. The panel presentations will follow a chronological order, beginning with artistic works from the mid to late twentieth century and ending with pieces from the contemporary moment. The first presenter, Frans Weiser, will examine how Argentine-Brazilian director Héctor Babenco appropriates US writer Peter Mathieson’s novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) in his 1991 film, whose depictions of Amazon indigeneity contrasts with more popular films like The Mission (1986). The panel will continue with Adriana Bezerra da Silva’s analysis of how Tybyra, A Brazilian Indigenous Tragedy, by Potiguara playwright Juão Nyn, critiques homophobia aong Indigenous groups via a restaging of an historical event from the seventeenth century. The next presenter, Jessica Carey-Webb, will return to the filmic realm to consider how Darren Aronofsky’s 2022 documentary The Territory represents the Uru-eu-wau-wau people’s struggles against deforestation and extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon. The panel will conclude with Jane Kassavin’s examination of the breaches between visibility and invisibility in artistic, translational, and poetic practices by the Amazonian Indigenous artist Joseca Yanomami. The panelists include scholars from Brazil and the United States at diverse ranks, including graduate students, early career scholars, and mid-career professors. The disciplinary backgrounds of the panelists also vary from comparative literature to Latin American studies to intermedial arts. The approaches to thinking about the Amazon and Indigenous voices underscore the growth of this field and its limitations. Together, these presenters will think through the visibility of Indigenous peoples in Brazil and the related dynamics of power that mark their struggles over territory, health care, and well-being.