Home

Geography Lecture Series

 

Abstract:

In the age of the climate change, human life’s pliability and open-endedness is also re-shaping anthropological debates. For debates centering on the urban domain, questions revolve around flexibility, adaptability and resilience, while in work drawing on the Anthropocene similar ideas of human being as subsumable to Gaia are emerging. This article reflects on how these perspectives imply a paradoxical human figure: On the one hand they convey a being that simultaneously infuses, consumes and transmogrifies the world. Conversely, the human figure is forged by theoretical and analytical orientations that prescribe that one should abandon such a human-centric reading of the world. The latter aspect is particularly evident if taking notions of the Anthropocene seriously, of becoming less through reinventing humanity and human life as more adaptable to imminent dys-/u-/eco-topias. Critically tracing this paradox, this article probes the urban Anthropocene and its lesser humans as desirable under the aegis of ‘resilience governance’ in Mozambique also exploring the involvement of utopic registers in defiance to such Developments.