Afro-Indigenous Resistance Through Literature

Abstract

The article frames Afro-Indigenous resistance in Latin America through literature as an ethical technology of memory and a counter-archive. Centering Arnoldo Palacios’s Las estrellas son negras (1949), it reads writing as a transformative act that converts collective suffering into form while exposing structural racism and state abandonment. In dialogue with Brazil, it highlights Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous literatures as contests over national language, oral tradition, and territorial dispossession. It stresses memory-work against erasure and the “overabundance” that fuels forgetting (Todorov).