In this work, I analyse written discourses by Indigenous teachers graduating in an Intercultural Education course, at Federal University of Goias, and I try to make critical sense of their conceptions and representations of academic writing in contact zones. These discourses are problematized in this article since Latin American decolonial theoretical perspectives intersected with assumptions form literacy and academic literacy critical studies. In the overall, these discourses point out to a naturalization of a racial hierarchical order, consequently, a ontological, epistemological and cultural one, in which mastering certain literacy practices and the authority to use them in the academic context is still a valid criterion for classification of groups culturally different. In highlighting an intrinsic relationship between the specific and highly valued textual configurations of academic literacy and the form of knowledge production from an Anglo-eurocentric matrix of power, I seek to situate such writing practices in the broader project of modernity/ coloniality and, consistent with the framework adopted, I seek for alternatives and viable ways for decolonization of these practices, such as the opening of the academy for new epistemological possibilities and hence to new forms of production and expression of knowledge, especially in intercultural contexts. In this direction, I sum up Indigenous and no Indigenous contemporary critical perspectives on the relationship between forms of situated knowledge and other possibilities of appropriation of academic writing so that they can transmit more clearly a geo-body politics location and then convey other ways of thinking, knowing and mean the world.
geopolitics of academic writing; contact zones; decolonization of academic literacy