POSTCOLONIAL HISTORICAL AMBIGUITIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL TENSIONS IN PARANÁ, BRAZIL

Abstract

Current paper discusses how the colonizers disrespect for the people and the environment and the tensions produced therein had a destructive potential in the state of Paraná, Brazil. Research focuses on the environment in the Brazilian context through the analysis of texts and contexts that have never been worked out either in international postcolonial studies nor in Brazilian ones. Three texts on the Paraná from different historical periods will be investigated. The first text consists of two reports, or rather, The Discovery of the Guarapuava Hinterlands, by Portuguese Afonso Botelho de Sampaio, and Memoirs on the Discovery and the Colony of Guarapuava, by Father Francisco das Chagas Lima, respectively hailing from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Whereas the second text is Pioneering in South Brazil: Three Years of Forest and Prairie Life in the Province of Paraná by the Englishman Thomas P. Bigg-Wither who traveled throughout the highlands and plateaus of the middle Paraná in the last quarter of the 19th century, the third text consists of a series of depositions by pioneers and transcribed in Colonization and Development of Northern Paraná. The three texts show how the biological equilibrium has been disrupted by the deep tensions between the colonized and the colonizers