Beyond the Anthropocene A Postnational Social Alternative in Darcy Ribeiro’s “Ivy-Marãen: A Terra Sem Males, Ano 2997”

Abstract

The utopian short story “Ivy-Marãen: A Terra Sem Males, Ano 2997” written by the Brazilian anthropologist and author Darcy Ribeiro in 1997 and posthumously published in 2008 critically addresses the social and political injustices that indigenous minorities and people of color have to endure ever since the Eurocentrically proclaimed discovery of the American continent. In the scope of this article, I argue that the narrative text is a strong fictional attempt to give the voiceless minorities a voice as well as to dismantle their constantly reiterated marginalization. In his narrative, the author does not only take up the ancient myth of “Ivy-Marãen,” “the land without evil” and at the same time makes it accessible even to unexperienced and untrained readers, but he also displays a vision of future convivialism from a non-white and non-Eurocentric perspective. As will be illuminated in a critical analysis of the text, this social alternative to the present is based on a postnationalism that goes beyond the Anthropocene.