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 proceed in chronological order from the nineteenth century through the contemporary moment. Xana Furtado will open the session by analyzing how Maria Firmina dos Reis engaged with the representation of Indigenous women in ways that reinforced stereotypical imagery typical of Indianismo as a literary movement. The second presenter, Ginevra Bria, focuses on the mid-twentieth century as she considers how Claude Lévi-Strauss rendered the lived experiences of Indigenous Brazilians invisible in his writings on kinship, even as he documented via drawings the daily lives of Amerindians in Mato Grosso. Next, Christian Elguera analyzes how Kaká Werá Jecupé describes the negative impact of toxicity on indigenous bodies and landscapes in the city of São Paulo in the 1993 book Oré Awé Roiru´a Ma = Toda as vezes que dissemos adeus. The panel concludes with Letícia Barbosa turning her attention to the invisibility of Indigenous peoples within the Brazilian national school curriculum, which she reads through a decolonial lens by drawing on the ideas of Mary Louise Pratt and Davi Kopenawa. The panelists include scholars from Brazil, Peru, and the United States at diverse ranks, including graduate students and early career scholars. The disciplinary backgrounds of the panelists also vary from Indigenous studies to Brazilian studies to art history. 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 (in)visibility of Indigenous peoples in Brazil and the related dynamics of power that have long marked their lives in contested territories and cultures.