“Eroticism” of the Mapu: Poetics and Politics of Land Recovery in the Work of Roxana Miranda Rupailaf

Abstract

The relations between human and nonhuman lives have been widely approached by Mapuche scholars (Calfío, Curivil, Pichinao, among others). However, they demand greater attention from non-indigenous researchers not only from an epistemological or ontological focus but a political one. This paper addresses the sensory, spiritual, territorial and erotic relationships between bodies of the Mapu in El Shumpall (2014). I analyze the representation of an imagined space of “good living”, which in the Western literary tradition would be equivalent to a locus amoenus. This poetics, I argue, dialogues with the struggles for the “territorial recoveries” in the williche-lafkenche Mapu.