Indigenous Voices in Literature (Latin America)

Diálogo, 2019

lenges and dangers their communities face. To varying degrees, they have transformed themselves into activists: organizing marches and public protests, publishing open letters to government officials, participating in national and international gatherings, and founding grassroots organizations. In this article, we approach the writers described here as public intellectuals who are responding to both historical injustices and current political realities. We explore the political dimensions of their creative work that unify individual and collective concerns, considering their activism in two dimensions. First, we consider their function as Indigenous intellectuals and activists, in the manner described by US anthropologist Joanne Rappaport (2008) and Chilean historian Claudia Zapata (2007 and 2008). Second, the re creation of their communities' oral traditions and cosmologies in literary spaces, as well as in social spaces, extends far beyond the artistic sphere. It is important to acknowledge that these writers' literary production in their ancestral languages is a political act in and of itself. The three Mexican writers whose work we discuss, Ruperta Bautista Vásquez, Hubert Matiúwàa, and Mikeas Sánchez, all grew up with an Indigenous language as their first language. Colombian Fredy Chikangana learned Quechua as an adult, as part of

An Interdisciplinary Studies Journal. Los cinco puntos cardinales en la literatura indigena contemporánea.

IATEFL YLTSIG Blog, 2024

It is equally essential for readers to find themselves represented in literary texts, in order to construct their subjectivity and forge self-assertion, as well as to be able to see beyond themselves, to understand others and other ways of thinking, acting and living, and develop empathy. Both, a lack of representation and a distorted kind of representation can hinder the development of intercultural sensitivity and respect for diversity. With regard to diversity, it is my concern, as well as that of colleagues from Argentina, that local indigenous communities and their languages are not often present in books that could be used in the EAL class. There are very few books in English depicting these communities, even fewer, combining English with indigenous languages and fewer still, written by authors from indigenous origin. Four of these bi/multilingual books are discussed in this blog post.

Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2023

The article both presents how, from the end of the 1980s onwards, native peoples have begun to occupy certain spaces of textual production and circulation that they had not previously occupied in the Brazilian cultural scene (for social, linguistic, and cultural reasons, but also political and juridical) and discusses how this process has provoked a vigorous movement of dilation of traditional textual and discursive borders in Western culture. Texts deriving from indigenous peoples in the sphere of academic discourse are, in general, bilingual, and are structured in ways that combine aspects of intellectual production with those of artistic creation. Moreover, they are also structured around a rather complex conception of the notion of authorship (considering that they are written by an author but represent the voice of their people). As examples, the article analyzes the case of Os cantos tradicionais Ye'kwana [Traditional Ye'kwana Chants], by the indigenous teacher and researcher Fernando Ye'kwana Gimenes, winner of the 2020/2021 edition of the Dirce Cortes Riedel Masters Dissertation Award by the Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature, as a typical example of the cultural phenomenon discussed. The traditional Ye'kwana chants present significant transgressions in relation to the traditional notions of narrative logic and the dominant forms of narration in the fields of literature and history. The awarding of this academic prize to an indigenous inhabitant of the forest, on the border between Brazil and Venezuela, by the largest association of comparative literature in Latin America, in addition to being an important act in political terms, demonstrates how urgent it is to rethink processes of global literary dissemination beyond the restricted frameworks configured by the logic of hegemonic cultures, which are based on closed divisions and hierarchies. With this, we intend to contribute to the process of including Amerindian texts in the repertoire of Comparative Literature and World Literature.

Lexington Books , 2017

While there are differences between cultures in different places and times, colonial representations of indigenous peoples generally suggest they are not capable of literature nor are they worthy of being represented as nations. Colonial representations of indigenous people continue on into the independence era and can still be detected in our time. The thesis of this book is that there are various ways to decolonize the representation of Amerindian peoples. Each chapter has its own decolonial thesis which it then resolves. Chapter 1 proves that there is coloniality in contemporary scholarship and argues that word choices can be improved to decolonize the way we describe the first Americans. Chapter 2 argues that literature in Latin American begins before 1492 and shows the long arc of Mayan expression, taking the Popol Wuj as a case study. Chapter 3 demonstrates how colonialist discourse is reinforced by a dualist rhetorical ploy of ignorance and arrogance in a Renaissance historical chronicle, Agustin de Zárate's Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú. Chapter 4 shows how by inverting the Renaissance dualist configuration of civilization and barbarian, the Nahua (Aztecs) who were formerly considered barbarian can be "civilized" within Spanish norms. This is done by modeling the categories of civilization discussed at length by the Friar Bartolomé de las Casas as a template that can serve to evaluate Nahua civil society as encapsulated by the historiography of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a possibility that would have been available to Spaniards during that time. Chapter 5 maintains that the colonialities of the pre-Independence era survive, but that Criollo-indigenous dialogue is capable of excavating their roots to extirpate them. By comparing the discussions of the hacienda system by the Peruvian essayist Manuel González Prada and by the Mayan-Quiché eye-witness to history Rigoberta Menchú, this books shows that there is common ground between their viewpoints despite the different genres in which their work appears and despite the different countries and the eight decades that separated them, suggesting a universality to the problem of the hacienda which can be dissected. This book models five different decolonizing methods to extricate from the continuities of coloniality both indigenous writing and the representation of indigenous peoples by learned elites.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2011

American Literary History, 2023

This essay considers three recent works in NAIS scholarship that take up past and present-day understandings of writing in the Americas: Gesa Mackenthun and Christen Mucher’s edited collec￾tion, Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (2021); Chadwick Allen’s Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native American Literature and Arts (2022); and Edgar Garcia’s Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (2020). Although writing is not the most immediate brief of any one study reviewed here, each contributes to the continuing relevance of thinking about the scholarly role of this category. In particular, I explore how each book enables us to see the concept of writing in ways that are not reducible to the positions outlined above, even while addressing the interpretive risks each position poses. Rather than reading these works as polemics invested in an either/or choice on the matter of expansive or narrow definitions of writing, I suggest that each con￾tribution be understood as an act of scholarly generosity that proffers decolonial ways of interpreting the communicative media of the Indigenous Americas.

OXFORD BIBLIOGRAPHIES, 2021

Introduction The contemporary continental emergence of a significant number of indigenous intellectuals who have been trained in the academic fields of social sciences (history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, law, education, etc.) and have continued to be engaged with the social struggles of their ethnic communities of origin is a major sociocultural phenomenon not so well known in Latin America. Beginning in the 1960s, but with a stronger sociopolitical visibility in the 1980s and 1990s, indigenous intellectuals’ production of knowledge has become the backbone of many indigenous movements and proposals in the continent. Just like the booming appearance of modern indigenous literary writers (see Oxford Bibliographies article in Latin American Studies “Indigenous Voices in Literature”), the contemporary rise of indigenous intellectuals has reconceptualized indigenous communitarian worldviews and contributed to the study of their own social realities from their specific needs, cultural perspectives, and native languages. Indigenous intellectuals and scholars have flourished in the early 21st century, transforming knowledge and academic discourses into tools of indigenous cultural self-recognition; criticism of neocolonial forms of subordination and exploitation; and new conceptual ways of understanding history, democracy, communal life, political participation, cultural representation, and our human relationship with nature (Mother Earth). The purpose of this bibliographical essay is to offer an interdisciplinary and continental comprehensive view about these critical reflections, research studies, reports, interviews, essays, testimonies, manifests, discourses, and other conceptual contributions of Latin American indigenous intellectuals and communitarian leaders from the 1960s to the present. I have limited this vast and complex intellectual production to three fundamental indigenous debates: first, the criticism against neocolonialism, racism, and discrimination; second, self-defense of indigenous human rights and pluricultural laws; and, third, the development of judicial systems to protect the rights of Mother Earth—all of which lead to constructing new societies based on universal principles of ethnic diversity, respect for social equality and reciprocity, and living together in harmony. There are many other areas of indigenous sociopolitical production that are not considered here. That is why this study is a modest and preliminary tribute to a long and much more complex indigenous intellectual production that emerges based on exclusion, discrimination, and other forms of social inequality still suffered by many indigenous peoples in Latin America. This essay, thematically organized, provides an inclusive selection of a very heterogeneous spectrum of contemporary Latin American indigenous intellectuals, academics, activists and communitarian leaders, in conjuction with others who have been inspired or influenced by them. The purpose here then is to visibilize these contemporary indigenous authors, thinkers, and activists, even if their ideas, studies, and social reflections can be related to precolonial or colonial times. The strong presence of social leaders such as Berta Cáceres in Honduras, Isildo Beldenegro in Mexico, or José Tendetza in Ecuador, and many many others—some of whom have been killed, tortured, and criminalized— cannot be separated from the concepts and critical studies produced by indigenous intellectuals. I want to thank Agustín Grijalva and Maria Warren for their invaluable help. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766581/obo-9780199766581-0245.xml?q=Grijalva%20&fbclid=IwAR02XRk8o66fbQrslTmGUsa1wHJcwXo09D_sBbht1cw3qOiTVamwQ273ul0#firstMatch