Education, resistance and politicization: on the sense of education in the contemporary Brazilian Indigenous litera-ture

Abstract

In the paper, from a systematic analysis of the literary production of Brazilian Indigenous writers, we will argue that, since the middle of XXs, Brazilian Indian peoples start to affirm and use the public sphere, in terms of activism, militancy and engagement, as the strategy and the place par excellence to the thematization of national Indian condition, as reaction to processes of social-economic expansion and political-cultural negation which put in check their own existence, refusing also the technocratic paternalism and dependent responsibility imposed to them. With the purpose of consolidating themselves as active public-political subjects, they opted for school education and for the appropriation of epistemological tolls and digital techniques which allow them to insert in the national socialization, to modernize politically, culturally and epistemologically in order to streamline a perspective of criticism regarding our conservative modernization from the internal communitarian self-organization and the construction of a network of collaboration among the indigenous nations. This posture leads to the deconstruction of the image cultural and normatively produced in terms of colonization, of a savage, rude and barbarous Indian, restricted to the more far corner of forest, incapable of civilization; and, in its place, it is consolidated exactly the role of the socialized Indian, in the full capability of political citizenship, producing and publicizing the own knowledge, culture and art. From the appropriation of school education and of these epistemological-digital tools and techniques we go, therefore, to an activist, militant and engaged posture in the public, political and cultural sphere, by means of the correlation of Indian Movement and Indian literature, in which the promotion of ethnic-anthropological singularity is in the basis of the criticism to modernity constituted and performed by Indian peoples, their intellectuals and writers.