Arrow-Word: Orality, Memory, and Indigenous Resistance in the Amazon

Abstract

Abstract: This article proposes a reflection on the power of orality in contemporary Indigenous literature, understanding it as an instrument of political, epistemological, and cultural resistance in the face of the historical erasure imposed upon Indigenous peoples, with an emphasis on the Amazonian context. It proceeds from the understanding that orality constitutes an ancestral technology for the transmission of knowledge, memory, and cosmologies, the permanence and re-elaboration of which challenge hegemonic models of knowledge production. The proposal, which employs a qualitative methodology, starts from a bibliographic analysis focused on contemporary Indigenous theoretical and literary productions, with an emphasis on works published between the 1990s and the 2020s. The corpus comprises authors such as Graça Graúna, Daniel Munduruku, Eliane Potiguara, Márcia Kambeba, and Olívio Jekupé, whose publications in books, scientific journals, and academic essays constitute a movement of affirmation of Indigenous authorship and of revalorization of orality as an epistemological and aesthetic foundation. Thus, it seeks to highlight, even if preliminarily, how orality, upon being reinscribed into contemporary written production, places tension on the Western concept of literature and reaffirms the centrality of the word as a practice of historical continuity and identity affirmation for Indigenous peoples.

Keywords: Orality, Indigenous Literature, Amazonia, Epistemology