The concept of literature from the writing and the speeches of indigenous writers

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting the concept of literature from the writings and speeches of the indigenous writers Graça Graúna, Eliane Potiguara, Ailton Krenak and Daniel Munduruku, noticing how they understand what “literature” is. In order to do so, we analysed their writing and speeches on the subject, counterposing them to theorists who also conceptualise “literature”. Another point of investigation is about the use of the expression “indigenous literature”: does it have different characteristics from what is commonly considered “literature” in Brazilian literary historiography? Graúna, Potiguara, Krenak and Munduruku, among others, are the voices of their people, producing a writing based on identity, resistance and struggle, so that they can be inserted in the literate community, since many scholars still do not think of indigenous literature as literature. In addition to this, such writers seek to insert their literature as a way to stand out against a whole process of colonisation and subordination, which is still prevalent today.