Description:

Professor Tracy Devine-Guzmán of the University of Miami will give a talk on Native Sovereignty and Indigenous wellbeing. 

Despite Native peoples’ efforts to achieve recognition of their differentiated citizenship rights as established by the 1988 Constitution, dominant sociocultural discourses in Brazil continue to supplant indigenous political agency with the fanciful notions of “Indianness” that have long inhered in popular notions of nationhood. Political and civic leaders undermine Native political claims with startling frequency by displacing indigenous peoples temporally into a pre-colonial past or post-racial future.

This presentation considers the enigma of indigenous representation in the context of Brazil’s longstanding development schemes and current political and environmental crises. I argue for the urgency of rethinking defunct notions of “community” in accordance with the alternative notions of sovereignty and belonging at work in national and transnational Native philosophies, political activism, and cultural production.

Prof. Devine-Guzman researches cultural history and the history of ideas; indigenous and Native American politics and philosophies; nationalisms, and nation-building; race and ethnicity; cultural production under authoritarianism; and childhood and the political subjectivity of children. Her primary areas of focus are Brazil and the Andes, especially Peru. Devine Guzmán is the author of Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence (UNC Press, 2013). She is at work on a second book called, “Transnational Indigeneities,” which traces ideas by and about indigenous peoples across the Americas and into the Global South from the late colonial period to the present.

Sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Andean Cultures and Histories group, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.