Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Amazonia as a place, a subject, a point of view, and a socio-ecological world. The writers, thinkers, elders, artists, and activists contributing to this book are all concerned with Amazonia as a place, a subject, a point of view, and a socioecological world. A collection of voices, images, lands, waters, and spirits (both human and nonhuman), this book attempts to understand language in an extended sense--where writing, thinking, and art-making take the form of essays, poetry, images, testimonies, and hybridized other.
The anthology comprises two distinct narrative sections, temporal structures, and points of view: the River and the Forest. The river is a kind of timeline, a sentence, a thread (of water) winding its way through the book, a vein of narrative practice forever moving forward. Indigenous thought and histories, as well as issues of memory, erasure, rights, cultural practice, and the notion of ancestors and activism are explored. The space of the forest, meanwhile, is represented as one of oral testimony and conversation, of voices speaking inside the present, in a kind of circular time in which past and future both impress upon and constitute the current uncertain moment. The forest section includes recorded conversations with elders, shamans, artists, and thinkers, as well as poetry, oral testimony, and artistic works from Amazonia that use the forest as both ground and cover.
Synopsis
Amazonia as a place, a subject, a point of view, and a socio-ecological world. Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology is devoted to Amazonia, its peoples, allies, and nonhuman spirits, and their myriad material and immaterial practices, from certain cosmopolitics and visual languages to past and present forms of resistance. In all their various lines (and circles) of ecological and epistemological thought, the artists, elders, writers, theorists, shamans, curators, poets, and activists whose ideas, images, and struggles compose this book, are concerned with Amazonia as both a place and a point of view. Through the weaving of voices, myths, ancestors, and territories, and all their radical subjectivities, we understand language in this anthology in an extended sense: as testimony, textile, painting, river, forest, animal, ancestor, song, spirit, and sacred medicine. Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology inquires into decolonial feminisms and Indigenous temporalities, externalized memory and erasure, sacred plants in the shadow of pandemic corporate-state extractivism and systemic violence, the activist possibilities of the mythic imagination, and the common visual matrices of the Amazonian universe. The book also weighs the Western imaginary of the Amazon, both its colonial roots in racial capitalism and its corporate, technological, paternalistic present. Centered, however, is Amazonia itself, in all its many and numinous worlds and languages--visual, oral, botanical, ancestral, cosmological--by which it becomes narrated, passed on, and then narrated again.