Reconceptualizing African Epistemological Relationship with More-than-Human Natures

Exploring Diasporic Unity.

Abstract

D’Avignon argues that the history of mining capitalism has often studied African miners solely as laborers, ignoring their role as intellectual actors (D’Avignon 3). This reflects a broader colonial tendency to commodify and dehumanize both African bodies and the resources they engaged with, severing plants and minerals from the knowledge systems of their cultivators and miners. This alienation
obscures the rich epistemological relationships Africans maintained with more-than-human entities grounded in intellectual traditions distinct from colonial exploitation. This understanding becomes particularly evident when viewed through the trans-Atlantic slave  trade, in which Africans adapted their embodied epistemologies to reassemble and innovate their relationships with plants and minerals in lowland South America. [...]