Ancestral Future E-Book

Ailton Krenak

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Critical South
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 109

Beschreibung

In response to the damage caused by centuries of colonial ravaging and the current ecological, political and social crises, the leading Indigenous thinker and activist Ailton Krenak warns against the power of corporate capitalism and its destructive impact. Capitalism encroaches on every corner of the planet and orients us toward a future of promised progress, achievement and growth, but this future doesn't exist - we just imagine it. This orientation to the future also blinds us to what exists around us, to the plants and animals with which we share the Earth and to the rivers that flow through our lands. Rivers are not just resources to be exploited by us or channels to carry away our waste, they are beings that connect us with our past. If there is a future to imagine, it is ancestral, since it is already present in the here and now and in that which exists around us, in the rivers and mountains and trees that are our kin. In a spoken language that has the mark of ancestral oral wisdom, Krenak offers a new perspective that challenges and disrupts some of the assumptions that underpin Western attitudes and mentalities. His work will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the climate crisis and the worsening plight of our planet.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Series Title

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction – Alex Brostoff and Jamille Pinheiro Dias

A Time for Kinship

Reforesting the Imagination

Lessons in Longing

Greetings to the Rivers

Notes

Cartographies for After the End

Notes

Cities, Pandemics, and Other Gadgets

Notes

Affective Alliances

Notes

The Heart in the Rhythm of the Earth

Notes

An Oraliture of Encounter – Rita Carelli

Notes

Editorial Note

About the Author

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Series Title

Critical South

The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Series editors: Natalia Brizuela, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, and Leticia Sabsay

Leonor Arfuch,

Memory and Autobiography

Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,

Seven Essays on Populism

Aimé Césaire,

Resolutely Black

Bolívar Echeverría,

Modernity and “Whiteness”

Diego Falconí Trávez,

From Ashes to Text

Celso Furtado,

The Myth of Economic Development

Eduardo Grüner,

The Haitian Revolution

Ailton Krenak,

Ancestral Future

Ailton Krenak,

Life Is Not Useful

Premesh Lalu,

Undoing Apartheid

Karima Lazali,

Colonia Trauma

María Pia López,

Not One Less

Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,

The Politics of Time

Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,

To Write the Africa World

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe,

The Scent of the Father

Pablo Oyarzun,

Doing Justice

Néstor Perlongher,

Plebeian Prose

Bento Prado Jr.,

Error, Illusion, Madness

Nelly Richard,

Eruptions of Memory

Suely Rolnik,

Spheres of Insurrection

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,

Ch’ixinakax utxiwa

Tendayi Sithole,

The Black Register

Maboula Soumahoro,

Black is the Journey, Africana the Name

Dénètem Touam Bona,

Fugitive, Where Are You Running?

Ancestral Future

Ailton Krenak

Edited by

Rita Carelli

Translated by

Alex Brostoff and Jamille Pinheiro Dias

polity

Copyright Page

Originally published in Portuguese as Futuro Ancestral © 2022, Ailton Krenak Published in Brazil by Companhia das Letras, São Paulo. International Rights Management: Susanna Lea Associates

This English edition © Polity Press, 2024

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

111 River Street

Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6072-1 – hardback

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6073-8 – paperback

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938506

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Introduction: The Affective Alliances of Translation

A Time for Kinship

A defense of life emerges in this paradoxically titled book. In Ancestral Future, Ailton Krenak elucidates how humanity must amplify the sounds of the rivers and the rhythms of the Earth over and against the thrum of the metropolis and its mechanization of life. Necrocapitalism, he shows, systematically extracts our sense of presence, rendering us disconnected from the power of life. Both labor and land are ruthlessly exploited for profit, reinforcing the oppressive power structures dominating our world. The future, as necrocapitalism imagines it, reproduces a system of disposability that reaches beyond the human and impacts other forms of life. The act of fixating on a hypothetical and idealized future only intensifies the sensation of time accelerating beyond our control. Ailton, as he would be referred to in Brazil, shows us how constantly looking to the future causes us to neglect the present, which has ramifications that surpass human suffering and extend across the entire ecosystem, as our planet is increasingly subjected to the pressures of this rapid acceleration. The relentless pursuit of an imagined future has led to devastating effects on biodiversity, climate change, and the environment writ large.

But Ailton refuses to be bound by the crises of our times and the capitalist bondage of the future. Instead, he moves away from the dehumanizing automation of modern urban existence; he rejects the conditions of the Capitalocene. Within this seemingly bleak reality, he perceives an anti-teleological future, one that breaks free from the logics of accumulation. After all, Indigenous understandings of time differ significantly from linear concepts of progress. For many Indigenous communities, time is not experienced as a succession of isolated events, but, rather, as a continuous and interconnected cycle. Indigenous temporalities acknowledge the seasonal cycles of nature and the movements of celestial bodies, which serve as essential references for daily practices such as planting, harvesting, hunting, grieving, and healing. Ancestral memory is passed down through oral traditions that impart such values and principles, which guide social and political organization. In this context, time matters not only as it is measured by the clock and divided into hours, minutes, and seconds, but, more significantly, for lived experience.

For Ailton, the ever-shifting form of rivers reflects this nonlinear temporality. Through the lens of the water, this understanding of time leads Ailton to propose that if there is a conceivable future, it is at once ancestral and also present in the here and now. He urges us to draw wisdom from ancient knowledges embedded in nonhuman forms of life. This philosophy of time embraces the interconnectedness of beings and suggests that the future is rooted in ancestral knowledge. In his words, “rivers, those beings that have always inhabited different worlds, are the ones that suggest to me that if there is a future to imagine, it is ancestral, since it is already present.” Ailton’s philosophy of time thus relies on a perception of rivers as living beings that have traversed different worlds and taken different forms. By restoring “subjectivity to rivers and mountains,” as Rita Carelli writes in her afterword, Ailton highlights their enduring presence, suggesting that rivers carry time’s cyclical and interconnected nature as they flow. Carelli emphasizes the delicate task of conveying the currents of Ailton’s flowing thoughts.

As translators, we likewise seek to amplify the ways in which Ailton has become a voice for the injured rivers – not by romanticizing them and praising their pristine waters, but by bemoaning the devastation and toxicity the Capitalocene has inflicted on them. Ailton emphasizes the lessons that ancient rivers teach us and how they may guide us toward enhancing our existence without harming other forms of life. The history plotted in Ancestral Future, however, also acknowledges how major rivers such as the Nile in Egypt and the Ganges in India have been instrumentalized in the rise of civilization and the resultant onslaught of catastrophe. Near his village in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, the Doce River, as Ailton describes, has fallen into a coma from catastrophic mining contamination caused by the collapse of local dams. Ailton does not normalize these socio-environmental calamities; instead, he confronts them head on, leading the way toward a future that can only come to be if it is ancestral.

Ancestral wisdom, according to Ailton, has never existed as a fixed point in the past, but has always been a creation of the future; that is, an ethical mode of knowledge production that emphasizes how we build, inhabit, and create existence on and with the Earth. Ancestral Future’s approach to temporality and the futures it makes possible thus relies on forms of kinship that extend beyond the human. By recasting our existence in constellation with nonhuman life, Ailton urges us to break free from the shackles of exploitation and collectively work toward a more just and sustainable future. This perspective is deeply entwined with other beings who cohabit time–space with us, beings with whom Indigenous peoples recognize a relationship of interdependence. As such, the phrase “we-river, we-mountains, we-earth” conceives of a “we” that signifies an entanglement with these entities, an interdependence that ranges beyond mere observation or appreciation. Opening oneself to experiencing the world from the perspective of the rivers, the mountains, and the Earth enables a departure from the confines of anthropocentrism, in which humanity understands nature as separate and subordinate to itself. Indeed, Indigenous temporality awaits the time in which all living beings are in constellation with each other – a perspective that the exploitative speed of capitalist time violates viciously and repeatedly.

Reforesting the Imagination

Skeletons of iron and concrete, scaffolding pervaded by industry, structures that decimate forests, dispossess communities, and corral the commons: this is how Ailton characterizes “the prosthesis that cities have become worldwide.” If, on the one hand, the prosthetic metaphor alludes to biomedical means of life support, it also, on the other, refers to technological advances that blight the Earth by wiping out nonrenewable resources. In “Cities, Pandemics, and Other Gadgets,” Ailton rails against the historical opposition between the city and the forest, an opposition multiplied by capitalism’s ever-encroaching investment in urbanity. For Ailton, the urban order is not just an architecture of enclosure, but a culture of sanitation that transforms earth into dirt. Worse yet, the modern metropolis makes no space for o comum (the commons). While our translation of “the commons” nods toward an array of notions endemic to Western philosophy from Baruch Spinoza to Fred Moten, Ailton’s conceptualization conjures a vast sense of that which is shared or common among peoples, be it culture, space, or forms of life. And yet, rather than make space for human and nonhuman bodies to share, urban culture breeds privatization, promising a prolongation of individualist and identitarian life through technological means.

After all, the very concept of cidadania (citizenship) contains the word cidade (city). Citizenship, in other words, is founded on the city; urbanity produces national belonging. Conversely, florestania, a word that wonderfully defies translation, manifests how citizenship exceeds urban prerogatives. Containing the word floresta (forest), florestania expresses the ability to organize and advocate not only for the forest, but for waterways and for biodiversity and life beyond the cityscape. In Ailton’s understanding, florestania conveys the struggle to expand the space for exercising citizenship beyond urban settings and to extend human rights to the residents of the forest and the water. Pushing back against the compulsory sanitation of urban order imposed by pavement and private property, by the police and the prison industrial complex, florestania flowers in defense of the forest and the life forms that thrive there.

And yet, as deforestation continues to devastate Indigenous territories, Ailton’s approach to urbanity rejects Western logics that divide the city and the forest. On the contrary, he calls on us “to reforest our imagination,” and, in turn, “reconnect with a poetics of urbanity that restores the power of life.” How, in other words, can we contest the privatization and sanitization of urban spheres that capitalize on cloistering? What can we learn from the grammars of a yard growing wild? “How,” asks Ailton, “can we make the forest exist within us, within our homes, within our yards? … How can we convert industrial urban fabric into natural urban fabric, centering nature and transforming cities from within?” Such questions refuse to rhyme with neoliberal sustainability campaigns; instead, they press on, reforesting our imaginations in order to reforest the world.

Lessons in Longing