Climate-induced indigenous migration has become a radical adaptation vision in the Anthropocene. The article focuses on the problematic of representation of indigenous traditional knowledge and imagination in the Anthropocene, in Frafra ethnic group especially. The article does so by critically examining how indigenous traditional knowledge politicise anthropogenic climate change and migration conceived as a struggle between regimes of governing. It analyses alternative approaches to adaptation and resilience, from the Western scientific knowledge and modernist ontologies, often relying on the engagement of local communities, actively produced through the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality, understood as a relational outcome and contingent relation. I argue that indigenous traditional knowledge approaches to resilience and adaptation in the Anthropocene disrupt, contest and subvert modernist discourses of climate-induced migration. It is suggested that contemporary discourses of resilience and adaptation appear to be drawing to a close as it lacks an adequate agential, transformative and also opening up alternative possibilities.
This article presents a discursive critique of the Eurocentric paradigms of knowledge production that characterise much of the underlying logics in the age of neoliberal discourses on resilience, pointing out important areas not given sufficient attention. In particular, it highlights the limits of the modernist ontology of resilience, whereby extremely "vulnerable" African communities are encouraged "to become resilient" to climatic disruption and environmental catastrophe and to "bounce back" as rapidly as possible. The article moves the discussion forward, drawing from critical decolonial approaches, in alignment with Indigenous knowledges, to question and rethink meaningful alternative ontologies, ways of knowing and being, in adaptive governance. I argue that the recognition of the plurality of many worlds, rather than one world, highlighted through critical decolonial understandings of epistemic forms with Indigenous knowledges, can be counterposed to Western universality as an innovative ontology to decentre the world order in the problematic dominant development of resilience thinking.
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