Autoethnography and colonial imagining in Indo-American art: Mapuches decolonizing narratives.

Abstract

This investigation addresses the “autoethnographic text”, understood as an epistemic enquiry that a subject provides about vital processes that it seeks to give meaning to.  These texts are characterized by the integration of different voices and/or points of view, that create and represent a moral meaning (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005) and that, within the framework of a post/decolonial perspective, act by combining or infiltrating indigenous elements and concepts to create self-representations designed to intervene in the metropolitan modes of understanding and representation of the “other” (Pratt, 1999).  From this point of view, this work maintains that these types of texts emerge as a new strategy of Indo-American artistic and literary discourse in response to the colonial imaginary, whose mechanisms of reification are reversed by complex rhetorical processes, destabilizing the meanings legitimized by colonial institutionality. In order to observe this process, the visual and poetic speech of the Mapuche people is analyzed, opening up a discussion about the new processes of representation of current indigenous art.