XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Ailton Krenak and the Critique of Monoculture in Indigenous Thinking in Brazil

• In Event: Recasting Brazilian and World Literature Perspectives I

Abstract

“A monoculture of ideas is what I perceive throughout the repertoire of Western thought”, Brazilian Indigenous thinker, author, and activist Ailton Krenak once remarked. This observation encapsulates Krenak’s perspective on the character of a singular worldview prevalent in Western thinking. Indeed, a critical discourse surrounding monoculture appears as one of the driving political and conceptual forces in Krenak’s work. This presentation asserts that thoroughly examining this recurrent thread would benefit from a keen attention to his perspective that monoculture disconnects us from the broader spectrum of life experiences and senses that make us feel alive (Krenak, 2020), as well as from a close consideration of some of the affective alliances (2024) that nourish his thinking. In addition to rivers, mountains, rocks, and other non-human beings that participate in Krenak’s constellation, he engages with a diverse range of writers, musicians, and thinkers who are woven into the fabric of his works. Among them are Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Eduardo Galeano, Davi Kopenawa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Antônio Bispo dos Santos, and José María Arguedas. Krenak's books, which are gradually becoming accessible to English-speaking readerships, include “Ideas to Postpone the End of the World” (trans. Anthony Doyle, House of Anansi, 2020); “Life is Not Useful,” (trans. Alex Brostoff and Jamille Pinheiro Dias, Polity, 2023); and “Ancestral Future,” (trans. Alex Brostoff and Jamille Pinheiro Dias, upcoming from Polity, 2024). As we will see, his insights resonate both with Vandana Shiva’s introduction of the notion of “monocultures of the mind” (1993) to describe the dominance of single ways of thinking, which mirror the negative impacts of agricultural monocultures on biodiversity, and with how Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2023) posits that Indigenous peoples stand as a counterforce to the homogenizing character of globalization and industrial agriculture. Throughout the arguments that we will discuss, Indigenous peoples emerge as crucial barriers against the rise of a planetary monoculture characterized by exploitative agroindustrial practices. Their resistance echoes as a refusal to submit to the transformation of the Earth into what Viveiros de Castro terms a “biopolitical plantation.”

Author

• Jamille Pinheiro Dias, University of London