By the late twentieth century, changing social, economic, and political conditions along with new scientific insights and trends in ethics and philosophy presented challenges not fully addressed by utilitarian and preservationist conservation. Indigenous rights activists, advocates for animal rights and the rights of nature, ecofeminists, scholars in the social sciences and humanities, legal experts, and representatives of nongovernmental organizations, national governments, and international development agencies offered diverse perspectives and agendas. Many disputed the idea that people are not part of nature, while others suggested that Indigenous peoples should be considered guardians of nature. Some promoted sustainable development along with attention to the social, political, and cultural consequences of conservation, particularly for the survival of threatened cultures and marginalized groups that have often been displaced by reserves. These developments led to the emergence of a stewardship approach to conservation that sustains complex ecosystems characterized by ecological and cultural diversity.

This chapter addresses proto-nationalist, Indianist discourses based on early colonial depictions of Brazil’s lands and people in the epic poems Uraguai (1769) by José Basilio da Gama, and Caramuru (1781) by José de Santa Rita Durão. Both poems offer examples of Indianist tradition that would go on to become models for the aesthetic nationalism of the nineteenth century. Given that the eighteenth century represents a coming of age in Brazilian literature, the absence of Africans in these two poems is noteworthy. This essay explores the simultaneous prominence of Natives and invisibility of Africans in colonial Brazilian literary texts and proposes that the mythological idealization of the Indian was used as a pretext to conceal the problem of the “Negro.” As with any ideology, the literary texts that committed to the building of Brazilian nationhood enforced ways of thinking about Afro-Brazilian people that endure through time.

English Enlightenment dramas set in the new world frequently depicted European oppression; from John Dennis’s Liberty Asserted (1704) through Aaron Hill’s Alzira (1736) to Arthur Murphy’s Alzuma (1767), playwrights present actions highly critical of European colonialism. These plays put indigenous critiques of European invasion into circulation, drawing on and rearticulating the writing of Incan Garcilaso de la Vega and Adario, Lahontan’s interlocutor in his famous Dialogue. Rather than regarding such discourse as European projection, I argue that the voices of protesting Incas and Mohawks be recognized as “energumen” or discourse of the other, whose critiques of empire, slavery and forced conversion shaped the development of progressive thought in Europe.