Drummond’s poetic activism: animal studies and ecocritics

Abstract

Throughout history, human beings have acted in a colonizing way on other species of life that inhabit the planet Earth, confirming an anthropocentric attitude that has generated irreversible damage to non-humans and to human beings. Based on this observation, our proposal with this article is to enable a discussion about the colonial relationships that human beings establish with the natural world, from the dialogue with animal studies and with ecocriticism, in order to demonstrate how these lines of thought, in contact with literature, are important ways to think about non-human resistances. Thus, our questions are enhanced by the encounter between, on the one hand, the texts of the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, that reveal a strong concern with the coexistence of all forms of life on planet Earth or “multispecies assemblage” and, on the other hand, the collaborative thinking of Donna Haraway (2016). In our reflection, we conceive that such texts are forms of what we call “poetic activism”.