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This article argues that an engagement with the life writings of eco-activists from the Global South serve as potential epistemic sources to envision alternative modes of developmentalism, a future grounded in sustainability, and to formulate anti-capitalist ethics. It revisits Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and A Day: A Detention Diary and Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed: A Memoir as significant life narratives that, besides critiquing the colonial and neocolonial models of growth, assert the importance of acknowledging the voices of disadvantaged communities and excluded knowledge systems in order to cultivate an equitable sense of development. The article argues that their life writings, rather than being mere chronologies of their personal experiences, thus emerge as alternative methods of knowledge production and testimonies of decolonial ecological ethics. In making such claims of these life narratives it offers an alternative conception of hope that is more aligned with plural knowledge generation, non-anthropocentric perspectives, and planetary principles.
Goutam Karmakar (Thu,) studied this question.