The Indian aesthetic-literary voice-praxis as activism and militancy: some arguments from current Brazilian Indian literature

Abstract

We argue that the aesthetical-literary voice-praxis of minorities and, in our case here, of Indian intelectuals or writers is marked by four fundamental characteristics that define its epistemological-political constitution, sense and linking, namely: it starts from the political and politicizing, carnal and belonging of/as minorities, who are a political construction both in terms of anthropological singularity and relatively to exclusion, silencing, marginalization and violence which they suffer as minorities; it has an inextricable linking and dependence between community group-tradition and individual, grounding and streamlining a lyrical-political I-We which does not dissociate the belonging to community-group and the individual experience, refusing, therefore, the perspective of an absolute-unlinked, voyeuristic-apolitical subjectivity; it starts from the affirmation of the communitarian tradition and the anthropological singularity and goes to the critic of the present, the communitarian tradition and belonging and the anthropological singularity as critic of the present; and it institutes the activism and militancy as its core, sense and direction, so that affirming itself as a political voice-praxis, compromised with the defense and promotion of the group of which it is part. In our proposal, which is based both on the interpretation of Brazilian Indian writers and in the literary and cultural post-colonial studies, and which is streamlined by a bibliographical analysis of this theoretical framework, we will argue about the importance of correlating the aesthetical-literary produciton of minorities (and, in our case, of Indians) with and as criticism of the present and radical politicization, in terms of ativism, militancy and engagement, both as condition for the understanding of its specificities and innovation, and as way for its linking to aesthetical, epistemological and political debates in terms of public sphere, since these writers of minorities (and, in the case, the Indians) aim exactly to politicize and to publicize the history, the condition and the claims of their communities and groups by means of the art-literature.