Earth Beings mot extraktivismen

En dekolonial analys av Mapuchefolkets poesi

Abstract

Earth Beings Against Extractivism: A Decolonial Analysis of Mapuche Poetry

The purpose of this analysis is to examine two poems by two Mapuche poets: María Teresa Panchillo’s “I am…” and Ricardo Loncón Antileo’s “Puma’s prayer”. On the one hand, the analysis intends to scrutinise how nature and more-than-humans or earth-beings are represented in the poems, and, on the other hand, to examine the narratives’ resistance and struggle against environmental destruction.

In order to analyse the poems, I apply two perspectives: Latin American cultural theory of decoloniality, on the one hand, is used to show the discourse rupture that the Mapuche literary narrative has achieved, and on the other hand, an ecocritical perspective is used to show the relationship between literature and environment in interaction with nature, culture, and humans. To accomplish my purpose, and to explain the content of the texts, I employ two concepts from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: ‘perspectivism’ and ‘multinaturalism’, and the term earth-being from Marisol de la Cadena; both authors study indigenous cosmovision from different parts of Latin America.