Rubber Colonization and Indigenous Resistance in Early Narratives about the Amazon

My dissertation analyzes and compares the way writers from distinct professions elaborate sometimes ambivalent critiques of colonial ideologies and the environmental and human cost of rubber extraction in the South American rainforest. I examine processes of colonization and indigenous resistance in narrative texts about the Amazonian region to investigate the interactions of indigenous knowledge and practices with state and corporate power, with modern ways of life, and their capacity to reconsider the interrelationships between humans and non-human entities. The authors I study (Jorge von Hassel, Jenaro Herrera and Fernando Romero) questioned or reproduced the positivist stereotypes about Amazonian peoples, even celebrating or centering indigenous practices towards non-human entities (such as plants, animals, or artifacts) to draw attention to the multiplicity of worlds that converge in contact zones. Through environmental humanities, memory and human rights studies, and decolonial and indigenous studies, I focus on the interactions of indigenous knowledge and practices with state and corporate power, with modern ways of life and their capacity to reconsider the interrelationships between humans and non-human entities.