Seminar with Patricia Lorenzoni, Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism, Uppsala University:
In a speech recently held at the UN headquarters in New York, Brazilian president Jais Bolsonaro forcefully rejected any notion of the Amazon being a ”heritage of humanity”, and instead declared Brazil’s exclusive sovereignty over those parts of the Amazon falling within Brazilian nation-state borders. Several commentators regarded this speech as a return to Cold War rhetorics. However, I argue that something more fundamental is put at stake in the struggle over the Amazon. The very contemporaneity of territorial colonial expansion in the area uncovers inherent tensions in modern notions of the political in ways that go way beyond inventories of heritage and Occidental ideas of preservation. Reflecting on other possible ways of thinking the political, I will turn to the mobilisation among indigenous women in Brazil and articulations of territoriality.