Brazil’s increase in ecological catastrophes is directly associated with the permanence of ancestral colonization dispositifs in governing territories and populations—especially among the poorest, most peripheral, and racialized. From the perspective of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, the Falling of the Brazilian Sky—our climate apocalypse—has its cosmopolitical origins in the colonial invasion of Amerindian territories by the “napë” [white men] and the extractive violence of the “people of the commodity.” The catastrophic events we are witnessing today would then be an actualization of these colonial, racial, and capitalist techniques and technologies in contemporary spiritual, cultural, economic, ecological, and political practices.
The current scenario of apocalyptic acceleration is experienced amid the rise of a far-right movement supported by Christian theological and political beliefs. These Christian-cosmological perspectives are often managed to legitimize and justify denialist stances, neoliberal policies that undermine environmental protections, and racist attacks against Indigenous, Quilombola and Urban Black People—these populations struggle to defend the ecosystems that are essential for sustaining life both in the country and globally. In other words, while the Brazilian evangelical far-right has accelerated the Falling of Sky, the calamitous consequences of these events have inflicted suffering, pain, and death, particularly among Indigenous populations and those of African spiritual ancestrality—whose engage with the world-land-territory-space and its multiple biomes through cosmological frameworks other-than-Christian, other-than-Modern, other-than-Capitalist. Within this context, the series of environmental disasters in Brazil can be understood and examined as a form of cosmopolitical warfare—which expresses a conflict between sacred worlds and their respective modes of modeling territories and inhabiting the world. In my view, the cosmopolitical warfare in Brazil is a kind of the spatialization of the Christian-Colonial-Modern-Capital-Racial eschaton.
Based on the ethnographic description of what would come to be considered one of the greatest environmental crime-disasters in the modern history of mining industries in the world, the collapse of the iron ore tailings mine in the city of Mariana (Minas Gerais, Brazil), I aim to create a critique dialogue between Process Philosophy, Philosophy of Multiplicity, Amerindian cosmologies, and Black Feminist Theory to explore the state of cosmopolitical conflict observed in Brazilian ecological catastrophes. More specifically, I plan to establish a zone of correspondence between Isabelle Stengers, Catherine Keller, Gilles Deleuze, Davi Kopenawa, Ailton Krenak, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Denise Ferreira da Silva to support an exploratory journey into the conflicts that shape the contemporary Brazilian cosmopolitical setting.
Brazil’s increase in ecological catastrophes is directly associated with the permanence of ancestral colonization dispositifs in governing territories and populations—especially among the poorest, most peripheral, and racialized. From the perspective of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, the Falling of the Brazilian Sky—our climate apocalypse—has its cosmopolitical origins in the colonial invasion of Amerindian territories by the “napë” [white men] and the extractive violence of the “people of the commodity.” Based on the ethnographic description of what would come to be considered one of the greatest environmental crime-disasters in the modern history of mining industries in the world, the collapse of the iron ore tailings mine in the city of Mariana (Minas Gerais, Brazil), I aim to create a critique dialogue between Process Philosophy, Philosophy of Multiplicity, Amerindian cosmologies, and Black Feminist Theory to explore the state of cosmopolitical conflict observed in Brazilian ecological catastrophes.