The project explores the function of the category of the índio in imagining Brazil, in the past and in the present. Dealing both with ideas of the índio as a mythical origin of the nation, and how such images are reactivated not only in colonial discourses but also in indigenous decolonial mobilisation, the project pays special attention to the coevalness of colonial expansion in Brazil; the existence of an active frontier in the north, as well as the continuing social life of non-colonised people, officially labelled “isolated”.

The theoretical starting-point is that the coevalness of colonial expansion puts very notion of the political in late modernity at stake. The frontier, thus, carries implications for how society and political life as such can be imagined.

Project leader: Patricia Lorenzoni.

Financier: The project has been funded by Hilding Svahn’s fund for Latin American Studies and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.