Márcio Souza

The Word as Resistance in the Amazon

Abstract

This article proposes a critical reading of Márcio Souza’s written production as an artistic and intellectual project that challenges official narratives, rescues subaltern voices, and denounces the multiple forms of violence—symbolic, historical, environmental, and social—that mark the Amazonian territory. The study seeks to demonstrate that, through his historical novels, films, plays, essays, and public interventions, Souza articulates a language that refuses the silencing imposed on the forest and its peoples, Turning the word into an arena of debate and identity affirmation. He is a writer whose intellectual trajectory stands as one of the most vigorous expressions of cultural resistance in the Brazilian Amazon. As a writer, filmmaker, playwright, essayist, critic, and cultural manager, Souza has built a multifaceted body of work, marked by the confrontation with symbolic hegemonies imposed upon the region and by a radical commitment to the history, culture, and conflicts of the Amazon. In his work, the word transcends its basic communicative function and becomes a political act and a gesture of insurgency. This research also highlights that, by situating his discourse at the heart of a region shaped by coloniality, predatory extractivism, and sociocultural exclusion, Márcio Souza establishes a voice that goes beyond denunciation: his work reconfigures the ways of narrating the Amazon, endowing it with complexity, historicity, and autonomy. Thus, this study aims to discuss how the word, in its aesthetic and political dimensions, operates as an instrument of resistance in Márcio Souza’s thought and creative practice, contributing to the strengthening of a critical Amazonian consciousness and to the broadening of the Brazilian cultural repertoire.