Amazonia

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 socio-ecological 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, exploring indigenous thought and histories, issues of memory, erasure, rights and cultural practice, as well as the notion of ancestors and activism. 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. These voices include 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.