Fiction, Literature, Indigenous Storytelling and History

This project explores the unique potential of historical fiction as a transformative method to create counter-representations ofIndigenous peoples in Brazil, where they are often seen as inferior and savage because of their close connection to nature.

Thesestereotypes, spread by European colonisers through literature and historiography, have become ingrained in collective sensibilitiesand are currently used to justify racism against Indigenous peoples, the illegal occupation of their lands and the deforestation of theAmazon rainforest.

Historiography has criticised these views, but due to its dominant epistemology, which relies firmly on writtenrecords, the field does not usually go beyond deconstructive ambitions.

Indigenous ethnic groups, on the other hand, tend to pass ontheir histories orally, so their ecocultures and resistance to colonialism fall outside the lens of prevalent epistemology.

The centralresearch question of this project is:How can historical fiction help us explore pluralistic views of the Indigenous pasts and open up new visions for a sustainable anddiverse future?Answering this question calls for innovative and interdisciplinary methods to achieve three goals: (1) to understand how Brazilianwriters have used historiography and fiction to represent Indigenous peoples in historical novels; (2) to identify how theepistemology of historiography constrains (or even silences) the writing of Indigenous historical fiction; (3) to develop a method ofcollective writing with Indigenous authors that allows us to co-create representations of their pasts and ecocultures.

The projectdraws on Decolonial Studies, Theory of History and Literary Theory, and combines methods of discourse and intertextual analysis,qualitative interviews and collaborative writing with Indigenous writers from Brazil.

The proposal moves from deconstruction toreconstruction in a context of growing appeal for a sustainable, multicultural and decolonised world.