“Ser mulher é ser Xingu violentado por belo monte” : uma leitura ecofeminista do romance "Maria Altamira", de Maria José Silveira

Abstract

This dissertation examines how literature becomes a space of resistance to colonial and patriarchal violence in the Amazon, through an analysis of the novel Maria Altamira (2020) by Maria José Silveira. The narrative interweaves body and territory, unveiling wounds inflicted by developmentalist projects that transform rivers and forests into sacrifice zones, while simultaneously creating a space for insurgent forces of survival. By centering the voices of women, Indigenous peoples, and subalternized groups, the novel builds a fictional testimony that rewrites silenced memories and deconstructs hegemonic notions of progress. The research is grounded in the dialogue between ecofeminist perspectives (Brandão, 2003, 2020; Shiva; Mies, 1993, 2014), epistemologies of the South (Lugones, 2014, 2020; Kambeba, 2020; Bispo dos Santos, 2023), testimony studies (Seligmann-Silva, 2003; Penna, 2003) and decolonial environmental thought (Brum, 2021). Through a qualitative and interpretative approach, the study reads the novel as a site of political and aesthetic enunciation, where pain is transfigured into memory. The findings reveal that Maria Altamira goes beyond the record of destruction by recovering collective affective histories that nurture resistance. Its poetics merges denunciation and narrative strength, creating a fictional territory where plural and irreducible voices emerge. Rooted in women’s experiences and Amazonian ways of life, these voices weave ethical pacts between word, land, and memory, affirming literature as a practice of listening and reinvention in the face of enduring colonial wounds in both human and more-than-human bodies.