Problematizing Indigeneity in sub-Saharan Africa: Implications for natural resource management

Guodaar, Lawrence; Bardsley, Douglas K.

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.11.009

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 71 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It also requires a profound reorientation, including openness to learning from the ontologies of Indigenous peoples. This is challenging in the context of South Africa, where colonial genocide resulted in significant losses for Indigenous peoples, languages and cultures, and where diversity of ethnicities and ancestral heritages intersect with complex migration histories to generate status uncertainty and political complexity (Guodaar and Bardsley, 2021). Consequently, it is extremely difficult to connect storytelling with proteas with the stories, meanings or linguistic practices of the diverse inhabitants who have occupied this landscape and related to these plants over time.…”

Section: Phytography and The Ethics Of Writing With/listening To Plantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The paper emerges from an attempt to think through the seemingly intractable problem of how to engage ethically with endangered wildflowers in the context of contemporary South Africa, where conservation is embroiled in colonialism, apartheid legacies and white supremacism, and where contemporary extremes of inequality require that human livelihoods are prioritized over nonhumans in political discourse and policy. In this context, the environmental logic that gains most traction politically is one in which nature is commodified to conserve it; in the case of wildflowers, this translates as sustainable harvesting (McEwan et al, 2014) and (eco)tourism.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Multispecies storytelling in botanical worlds: The creative agencies of plants in contested ecologies

McEwan

2022

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper argues for engaging in multispecies storytelling with plants to better conceptualise the ethics and contested ecologies associated with biodiversity loss. It focuses specifically on proteas, the iconic species of South Africa's threatened fynbos biome, to explore the possibilities of an ethical dialogue between human and more-than-human diversities, and to consider what might be gained from understanding plants as both agentic in contested ecologies and as storytelling figures worthy of attention. The paper draws on John Ryan’s conceptualization of phytography as a way of engaging in multispecies storytelling with plants. It teases out interwoven botanic and human histories, and the ways in which iconic proteas have written themselves into the narratives of their human interlocutors in the context of European settler colonialism, conservation, floral nativism and post-apartheid nation-building. The case for phytography is developed through an examination of the corporeal rhetoric of proteas in two examples. The first concerns the Mace Pagoda, a protea that resists narratives of extinction by writing back its percipience, agency, and resilience into human stories of anthropogenic habitat loss. The second focuses on botanical traces that result from absence, specifically the non-appearance in recent years of proteas in the Cederberg area of the Western Cape. The paper suggests that absence is a form of corporeal rhetoric through which plants write themselves into narratives of rapid climate change and multispecies loss. The final section of the paper explores questions of ethics that emerge from engaging with plants as storytellers, reflects on the kinds of human-plant relationships that are possible in the context of environmental catastrophe, and examines the possibilities that phytography provides for more-than-human engagements with plant life.

show abstract

Section: Phytography and The Ethics Of Writing With/listening To Plantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%