In Planetary Longings eminent cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of thinking it has catalyzed. She turns to 1990s Latin American vernacular culture, literary fiction, and social movements, which simultaneously registered neoliberalism’s devastating effects and pursued alternate ways of knowing and living. Tracing the workings of colonialism alongside the history of anticolonial struggles and Indigenous mobilizations in the Americas, Pratt analyzes indigeneity both as a key index of coloniality, neoliberal extraction, and ecological destruction, and as a source for alternative modes of thought and being. Ultimately, Pratt demonstrates that the changes on either side of the millennium have catalyzed new forms of world-making and knowledge-making in the face of an unknowable and catastrophic future.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Sitting in the Light of the Great Solar TV
- Part I | Future Tensions
- 1—Modernity’s False Promises
- 2—Why the Virgin of Zapopan Went to Los Angeles
- 3—Mobility and the Politics of Belonging
- 4—Fire, Water, and Wandering Women
- 5—Planetarized Indigeneity
- 6—Anthropocene as Concept and Chronotope
- 7—Mutations of the Contact Zone: From Human to More-Than-Human
- 8—Is This Gitmo or Club Med?
- 9—Authoritarianism 2020: Lessons from Chile
- 10—The Ethnographer’s Arrival
- 11—Rigoberta Menchú and the Geopolitics of Truth
- 12—The Politics of Reenactment
- 13—Translation, Contagion, Infiltration
- 14—Thinking across the Colonial Divide
- 15—The Futurology of Independence
- 16—Remembering Anticolonialism
- Coda: Airways, the Politics of Breath
- Notes
- References
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- X
- Y
- Z
- Publication History
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