Introduction: The Affective Alliances of Translation

A Time for Kinship

A defense of life emerges in this paradoxically titled book. In Ancestral Future, Ailton Krenak elucidates how humanity must amplify the sounds of the rivers and the rhythms of the Earth over and against the thrum of the metropolis and its mechanization of life. Necrocapitalism, he shows, systematically extracts our sense of presence, rendering us disconnected from the power of life. Both labor and land are ruthlessly exploited for profit, reinforcing the oppressive power structures dominating our world. The future, as necrocapitalism imagines it, reproduces a system of disposability that reaches beyond the human and impacts other forms of life. The act of fixating on a hypothetical and idealized future only intensifies the sensation of time accelerating beyond our control. Ailton, as he would be referred to in Brazil, shows us how constantly looking to the future causes us to neglect the present, which has ramifications that surpass human suffering and extend across the entire ecosystem, as our planet is increasingly subjected to the pressures of this rapid acceleration. The relentless pursuit of an imagined future has led to devastating effects on biodiversity, climate change, and the environment writ large.

But Ailton refuses to be bound by the crises of our times and the capitalist bondage of the future. Instead, he moves away from the dehumanizing automation of modern urban existence; he rejects the conditions of the Capitalocene. Within this seemingly bleak reality, he perceives an anti-teleological future, one that breaks free from the logics of accumulation. After all, Indigenous understandings of time differ significantly from linear concepts of progress. For many Indigenous communities, time is not experienced as a succession of isolated events, but, rather, as a continuous and interconnected cycle. Indigenous temporalities acknowledge the seasonal cycles of nature and the movements of celestial bodies, which serve as essential references for daily practices such as planting, harvesting, hunting, grieving, and healing. Ancestral memory is passed down through oral traditions that impart such values and principles, which guide social and political organization. In this context, time matters not only as it is measured by the clock and divided into hours, minutes, and seconds, but, more significantly, for lived experience.

For Ailton, the ever-shifting form of rivers reflects this nonlinear temporality. Through the lens of the water, this understanding of time leads Ailton to propose that if there is a conceivable future, it is at once ancestral and also present in the here and now. He urges us to draw wisdom from ancient knowledges embedded in nonhuman forms of life. This philosophy of time embraces the interconnectedness of beings and suggests that the future is rooted in ancestral knowledge. In his words, “rivers, those beings that have always inhabited different worlds, are the ones that suggest to me that if there is a future to imagine, it is ancestral, since it is already present.” Ailton’s philosophy of time thus relies on a perception of rivers as living beings that have traversed different worlds and taken different forms. By restoring “subjectivity to rivers and mountains,” as Rita Carelli writes in her afterword, Ailton highlights their enduring presence, suggesting that rivers carry time’s cyclical and interconnected nature as they flow. Carelli emphasizes the delicate task of conveying the currents of Ailton’s flowing thoughts.

As translators, we likewise seek to amplify the ways in which Ailton has become a voice for the injured rivers – not by romanticizing them and praising their pristine waters, but by bemoaning the devastation and toxicity the Capitalocene has inflicted on them. Ailton emphasizes the lessons that ancient rivers teach us and how they may guide us toward enhancing our existence without harming other forms of life. The history plotted in Ancestral Future, however, also acknowledges how major rivers such as the Nile in Egypt and the Ganges in India have been instrumentalized in the rise of civilization and the resultant onslaught of catastrophe. Near his village in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, the Doce River, as Ailton describes, has fallen into a coma from catastrophic mining contamination caused by the collapse of local dams. Ailton does not normalize these socio-environmental calamities; instead, he confronts them head on, leading the way toward a future that can only come to be if it is ancestral.

Ancestral wisdom, according to Ailton, has never existed as a fixed point in the past, but has always been a creation of the future; that is, an ethical mode of knowledge production that emphasizes how we build, inhabit, and create existence on and with the Earth. Ancestral Future’s approach to temporality and the futures it makes possible thus relies on forms of kinship that extend beyond the human. By recasting our existence in constellation with nonhuman life, Ailton urges us to break free from the shackles of exploitation and collectively work toward a more just and sustainable future. This perspective is deeply entwined with other beings who cohabit time–space with us, beings with whom Indigenous peoples recognize a relationship of interdependence. As such, the phrase “we-river, we-mountains, we-earth” conceives of a “we” that signifies an entanglement with these entities, an interdependence that ranges beyond mere observation or appreciation. Opening oneself to experiencing the world from the perspective of the rivers, the mountains, and the Earth enables a departure from the confines of anthropocentrism, in which humanity understands nature as separate and subordinate to itself. Indeed, Indigenous temporality awaits the time in which all living beings are in constellation with each other – a perspective that the exploitative speed of capitalist time violates viciously and repeatedly.

Reforesting the Imagination

Skeletons of iron and concrete, scaffolding pervaded by industry, structures that decimate forests, dispossess communities, and corral the commons: this is how Ailton characterizes “the prosthesis that cities have become worldwide.” If, on the one hand, the prosthetic metaphor alludes to biomedical means of life support, it also, on the other, refers to technological advances that blight the Earth by wiping out nonrenewable resources. In “Cities, Pandemics, and Other Gadgets,” Ailton rails against the historical opposition between the city and the forest, an opposition multiplied by capitalism’s ever-encroaching investment in urbanity. For Ailton, the urban order is not just an architecture of enclosure, but a culture of sanitation that transforms earth into dirt. Worse yet, the modern metropolis makes no space for o comum (the commons). While our translation of “the commons” nods toward an array of notions endemic to Western philosophy from Baruch Spinoza to Fred Moten, Ailton’s conceptualization conjures a vast sense of that which is shared or common among peoples, be it culture, space, or forms of life. And yet, rather than make space for human and nonhuman bodies to share, urban culture breeds privatization, promising a prolongation of individualist and identitarian life through technological means.

After all, the very concept of cidadania (citizenship) contains the word cidade (city). Citizenship, in other words, is founded on the city; urbanity produces national belonging. Conversely, florestania, a word that wonderfully defies translation, manifests how citizenship exceeds urban prerogatives. Containing the word floresta (forest), florestania expresses the ability to organize and advocate not only for the forest, but for waterways and for biodiversity and life beyond the cityscape. In Ailton’s understanding, florestania conveys the struggle to expand the space for exercising citizenship beyond urban settings and to extend human rights to the residents of the forest and the water. Pushing back against the compulsory sanitation of urban order imposed by pavement and private property, by the police and the prison industrial complex, florestania flowers in defense of the forest and the life forms that thrive there.

And yet, as deforestation continues to devastate Indigenous territories, Ailton’s approach to urbanity rejects Western logics that divide the city and the forest. On the contrary, he calls on us “to reforest our imagination,” and, in turn, “reconnect with a poetics of urbanity that restores the power of life.” How, in other words, can we contest the privatization and sanitization of urban spheres that capitalize on cloistering? What can we learn from the grammars of a yard growing wild? “How,” asks Ailton, “can we make the forest exist within us, within our homes, within our yards? … How can we convert industrial urban fabric into natural urban fabric, centering nature and transforming cities from within?” Such questions refuse to rhyme with neoliberal sustainability campaigns; instead, they press on, reforesting our imaginations in order to reforest the world.

Lessons in Longing

Diverging from linear progress narratives that peg moral imperatives to crisis-mongering, Ailton’s approach acknowledges the ways in which dominant modes of knowledge production are conditioned by histories of genocide, dispossession, and...