Memories of Extractivism: Slow Violence, Terror, and Matter

Abstract

In this article, I wish to bring Davi Kopenawa's and Bruce Albert's The Falling Sky (first published in French in 2010) into dialogue with the two canonic genres of political memory in Latin America: on the one hand, the witnessing – in survivors’ accounts but also in verbal, visual, and architectural forms of monumentalisation – of the dictatorial state’s clandestine system of abducting, torturing, and killing those suspected of “subversion” and, on the other, the indigenous or peasant testimonios of community suffering and resistance against “structural violence” unleashed by state and para-statal counterinsurgency warfare. How, I ask, can Kopenawa’s memories of extractivism – of mining and agro-induced land grab, massacres, and the wipe-out of entire villages by epidemics but also of the turmoil unleashed within the forest’s fragile equilibrium of embodied as well as spiritual temporalities – be heard in a cultural, political, and juridical field that has been configured, for obvious reasons, around the notion of “human rights” and their violent transgression?