The Network of Metamorphic Processes in the Literature of the Maraguá and Macuxi Peoples

Abstract

The article addresses the theme of metamorphoses related to children's and youth literature through a focus on contemporary indigenous literature of the Maraguá and Macuxi peoples. The objective is to explain three metamorphic processes in the aforementioned literature, which achieve the following possibilities of understanding: firstly, due to its mimetic construction, understanding the procedure of mimesis as a metamorphosis; secondly, due to the themes engendered in indigenous narratives, in which there is a significant incidence of metamorphic enchantments due to animism, constitutive of their cosmogony; and, thirdly, by the proposal for a decolonizing and transformative/metamorphic reception suggested by this fiction. The theoretical treatment will be, in general, based on the theories by Roland Barthes and Luiz Costa Lima about mimesis; by the notion of animism and perspectivism contemplated, respectively, in the studies by Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; by the conception of enchantment by João de Jesus Paes Loureiro; and by studies guided by theoretical perspectives related to post-colonialism and the like, such as those by Miguel Nenevé, Georges Balandier, Arturo Escobar, Aníbal Quijano, Homi Bhabha e Ailton Krenac.