Quinteiro Pires Presents at MLA
Francisco Quinteiro Pires, a visiting professor at BU Romance Studies, recently presented a paper at the annual Modern Language Association convention titled “Sensing the ‘Discovery’: The First Contacts According to Pero Vaz de Caminha and Davi Kopenawa.”
From his abstract:
“This presentation explores the cultural frictions in the first contacts between Amerindians and non-indigenous people in the territory known today as Brazil. It focuses on the sensory descriptions of bodies and the environment in two crucial texts: Pero Vaz de Caminha’s Letter to King of Portugal Manuel I (1500), considered the birth certificate of Brazil, and Davi Kopenawa’s The Falling Sky (2010), composed in collaboration with the French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Caminha wrote a letter that provides a confounded portrayal of the Tupiniquim, which nonetheless contains the rhetorical strategies to justify the enslavement of indigenous people and is influenced by the scribe’s intention of asking the Portuguese king for a personal favor. Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman, narrated in his book the impact of the still ongoing process of colonization on indigenous perspectives and experiences. By examining and contrasting texts from different historic periods, this proposal investigates how representation based on the senses may reveal cultural shocks and misleading perplexity in these events described as first contacts. It adopts a sensory lens to uncover how the indigenous thought, based on shamanic dreams, reimagines forms of representation to make sense of the recurring environmental destruction and invasion of the Yanomami territories.”