Antes o mundo não existia: language imagery and books by indigenous authors

Abstract

It is known that only from the end of the 1970s, the figure of the indigenous author appears in the Brazilian publishing market. Although the question remains about what is the indigenous book (whether due to the indigenous presence in the book as a theme, authorship, character, etc.), such books occupy the Brazilian literary scene more and more. Literature of indigenous authorship registered and transmitted through books, as a political, translational and (inter) cultural act par excellence, allows us to think of literary writing as an identity index, that is, as a construction of the image of oneself and as an opening to the other. That is, as a relationship. In this way, we propose the reading of indigenous books as a performance act that wishes to dialogue in an emancipatory way with a community of readers, amidst irreducible cultural differences and the invention of he-teroclitic, verbal and visual discursive regimes. At the moment when the question about indigenous authorship seems to pose itself, finally, as an irreducible historical question to be faced by literary and / or cultural criticism, another question also emerges (seems to return), even more radical: what brings a book when it becomes a poetic and political artifact, an epistemic device, produced by the hands of communities of oral tradition? The book, therefore, can be understood as poetic, as a device, for the affirmation of cultural identities against hegemonic ones.