Racism and Indifference in Brazil: Anti-indigenous Text, Action, and Sensibility

Abstract

AbstractThe article investigates how racist trends have permeated Brazilian history and geography. It discusses the persistence of racism and indifference in the early post-independence and republic periods. Past relations continued to systematically impact the present in an always unfinished process of nation-building based on spurious treatments of socio-spatial differences. The discussion makes use of emblematic literature books and controversial interpretations of progress and national identity. One of the most relevant examples of the contested basis of national development, examined in the second part of the text, is the trajectory of indigenous peoples. The main reference is the Guarani-Kaiowa indigenous nation, which has been relentlessly impacted by an aggressive instrumentalisation of difference through the indifference of an agribusiness-based regional society. Their contemporary experience exposes multiple violence accumulated over time and through the production of an uneven space by explorers, missionaries, colonists, public authorities and, eventually, the export-oriented agribusiness sector. Despite all racist violence, the voice, consciousness and agency of indigenous peoples represent the most acute challenge to the status quo and the main source of creative politics in the country today.