Fábio Zuker // The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon

215 North Cayuga Street,Ithaca NY 14850

10 May, 2022

Description

Visiting Cornell scholar Fábio Zuker on the Amazonian Indigenous communities at the nexus of the climate crisis. Buffalo Street Books is proud to host Fábio Zuker for a conversation with Cornell professor Denise Osborne. They will discuss his book of essays, The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon: Dispatches from the Brazilian Rainforest, releasing June 7 from Milkweed Publications but specially available in-store at Buffalo Street Books in time for this event.  About the book In 2007, a seven-ton minke whale was found stranded on the banks of the Tapajós River, hundreds of miles into the Amazon rainforest. For days, environmentalists, journalists, and locals followed the lost whale, hoping to guide her back to the ocean, but ultimately proved unable to save her. Ten years later, journalist Fábio Zuker travels to the state of Pará, to the town known as “the place where the whale appeared,” which developers are now eyeing for mining, timber, and soybean cultivation.  In these essays, Zuker shares intimate stories of life in the rainforest and its surrounding cities during an age of raging wildfires, mass migration, populist politics, and increasing deforestation. A group of Venezuelan migrants wait at a bus station in Manaus, looking for someplace more stable than home, and an elder in Alter do Chão becomes the first Indigenous person in Brazil to die from COVID-19 after years of fighting for the rights and recognition of the Borari people. The subjects Zuker interviews are often torn between ties with their ancestral territories and the push toward capitalist gains; The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon captures the friction between their worlds and the resilience of movements for autonomy, self definition, and respect for the land.  About the Conversation Fábio Zuker is a writer and journalist. He holds a master’s degree from the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris and is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of São Paulo. For the spring 2022 semester, he is a Pre-Doctoral Research Scholar at Cornell University. He has also been three times a Pulitzer Center grantee. As a journalist he is a frequent contributor to Thomson Reuters Foundation and InfoAmazonia and has written for Amazônia Real, National Geographic, Revista Piauí, Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil, Agência Pública, and Nexo Jornal, among others. He is also the author of On an Escape Route: Essays on Writing, Fear, and Violence (Hedra Editions, only available in Portuguese). In recent years he has focused his research on stories of the Amazon rainforest, looking to write “nearby” the people whose land is being destroyed and their approaches to resistance. Denise M. Osborne is a lecturer in Portuguese in the Department of Romance Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), and her M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Teachers College Columbia University (New York, NY). Her main area of interest is second language acquisition, especially second language phonetics, both perception and production. She is also interested in investigating linguistic and non-linguistic factors that may affect the acquisition of and/or engagement in learning Portuguese as a foreign language, such as language attitude and ethnic identities. I want to read this!