Fábrica da floresta: a edição de livros indígenas como prática orgânica

Abstract

As a result of the struggles and political achievements of indigenous peoples by the end of the 20th century, today there is a vast bibliography of indigenous authorship in Brazil. Part of it, identified in this dissertation as Indigenous Literature, has been published, since the 1990s, by commercial publishers; the other part, here called Forest Books, is published in the context of differentiated indigenous schools since the late 1970s. This dissertation studies this bibliography from the point of view of its editorial characteristics, comparing the means of industrial production through which Indigenous Literature is published based on the organic and collective way of editing the Forest Books. Not trying to create value hierarchies between them, the comparison seeks to demonstrate how both are complementary from a political point of view. Probing the editorial characteristics of the Forest Books, this dissertation shows how the editing act is displaced from a historical trajectory of the use of writing and of books as colonization tools and becomes a method of reflection and revitalization of the knowledge and the languages of indigenous people. In order to do that, and having mainly the editorial paratexts present in such publications as bibliographic source, we describe the editing processes of the Forest Books, emphasizing the building of authorship – through the author's name – and the task of copyediting texts. The thesis includes two appendices containing, the first, the list of Forest Books studied throughout the chapters and, the second, a bibliographical survey of the contemporary indigenous publications in Brazil.