Ancestral Future, Ailton Krenak, translated by Alex Brostoff and Jamille Pinheiro Dias, 2024, Polity Press
The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who fled a decaying, divided Europe to settle in Brazil, is likely to have been the source of an optimistic adage about his adopted homeland that became popular after the 1940s.
Zweig’s book, Brazil, Land of the Future, articulated the exile’s love for his new country, even though his work has been described as naïve or even jingoistic, and the phrase itself was later cynically twisted by a wry Charles de Gaulle.
Nonetheless, this line was easily swept up in nationalist enthusiasm for the developmental prospects of this vast, untapped South American nation, and popularised as “Brazil is a country of the future”.
It’s obviously debatable the extent to which contemporary Brazil has lived up to this mantra in terms of economic and social development—but that is not really the point.
If the country has not given rise to monuments of capitalist achievement comparable to those of the Global North by which it can be judged in the latter’s sterile terms, it may be creating far more enduring legacies that are only now being seen for what they are.
In some respects, Brazil is becoming a powerhouse of visionary thinking about the future—philosophical alternatives to a blindly materialist, Western epistemology that with every passing day seems to erode more rapidly in its relevance to our ailing planet.
From Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed”, to the country’s role in the emergence of liberation theology, to the influence of decolonial studies across its academic curriculum, to the reverse migration out of cities by people seeking new hope in the countryside, to participatory budgeting, to anarcho-indigenism and novel ideas in ecological thought, Brazil is challenging the “knowledge” underpinning Euro-American hegemony.
Ailton Krenak offers an exciting example of this phenomenon as the source of highly original ideas shaping an alternative vision that defy Western categories and insist upon new ways of looking at the world the latter have laid waste to.
Ancestral Future is a book about time, and how in particular we can subvert linear progress narratives anchored within urban capitalism whose vision of the future ignores the present and forgets the past.
At the heart of the author’s critique is the overwhelming alienation of the city, constructed in opposition to nature as the only possible destination for human progress.
Krenak writes: “Urbanity establishes a way of life that is already being called necrocapitalism, but the ontology of the subject born in the city, who develops an urban way of thinking, is so powerful that they end up influencing other cultures worldwide.”
This systematically dominates our sense of being and disconnects us from the living world, reinforcing the oppressive power structures and dehumanising capitalist bondage that engulfs us and is destroying the environment.
Such is the omnipotence of the resulting outlook, he suggests, that “when we say ‘world’, we usually think of this one, a ‘world’ in constant dispute triggered by a management that has metastasized: capitalism, which some already call ‘the Capitalocene’.”
But there is another way, Krenak argues, and points to lessons offered by ancient rivers that he says can steer us through life in a direction that enhances our existence without harming other living things.
Krenak’s short books read like collections of essays, each chapter a reflection on a theme that, when brought together, amounts to a sum greater that its parts.
Lucid and eloquent, the voice of one of the most prominent indigenous leaders to emerge in the Americas is distinct and always playfully hopeful.
He combines a sweeping interest in the world around him with an almost limitless imagination to sound a clarion call for the diversity and change we need to transcend our tired limitations and build an alternative future.
His work can be positioned within a broader school of autochthonous thought emanating from Latin America since the 1960s, from Quijano to Castro-Gómez to Lander, that is not content to pay scholastic homage in the present to the metropolitan centre and foresees a radically different future.
Krenak writes: “My aim is to contribute, to some extent, to the dehierarchization of knowledge production – challenging the overemphasis on academic thought at the expense of other epistemologies that are so desirable and increasingly indispensable.”
In this and in his dream of a different world, Krenak’s work would resonate with Stefan Zweig—who also understood a thing or two about time.
Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, posted to his publisher the day before his suicide in 1942, was arguably premised on a dying European ideal. His final chapter begins with a quote from Shakespeare: “The sun of Rome is set. Our day is gone.”
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Categories: Brazil, South America