Decolonizing academic writing

literacy practices from Afro- Indigenous perspectives

Abstract

This article seeks to discuss academic literacy practices in relation to practices devised by an Indigenous master's student, who participated as an interlocutor in this study, throughout her trajectory in a graduate program in the field of language studies in the Midwest region of Brazil. To this end, it presents some of the key conceptions of literacy (Kleiman, 1995; Tfouni et al., 2013) that underpin this area of ​​study, expanding the discussion by incorporating a Afro-Indigenous conception of literacy (Brupahi Xerente, 2018, 2019; Correa Xakriabá, 2018; Evaristo, 2007; Hampaté Bâ, 2010; Santos, 2018, among others). In other words, it first relates conceptions of literacy to one another, allowing for a conceptual progression that introduces countercolonial perspectives on the different literacy practices experienced by the participant. With this in mind, ethnography seemed to be the methodological approach most aligned with the proposal, given the epistemological connections established with the view of literacy presented here. In ethnographic research, not only language matters, but also the various issues surrounding it, such as social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions. Further, just like in literacy studies, the focus of ethnography is the context. Put another way, the issues that arose in the field shaped this study, which, in turn, emerged from the very context in which it was conducted. Thus, the results call on universities to foster a “confluence of knowledge” (Santos, 2018), aiming to break away from the supremacy of Eurocentric foundations and move toward a more symmetrical relation with pluri-ethnic bases of scientific practices. This requires a change in posture as well as the creation of listening spaces, which should enable academia not only to hear-read Indigenous, Afro, and Quilombola thinkers and writers but also to embrace and engage with their voices.