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.
Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Sitting in the Light of the Great Solar TV 1 Part I. Future Tensions 1.Modernity's False Promises 33 2. Why the Virgin of Zapopan Went to Los Angeles 56 3. Mobility and the Politics of Belonging 75 4. Fire, Water, and Wandering Women 90 5. Planetarized Indigeneity 107 6. Anthropocene as Concept and Chronotope 117 7. Mutations of the Contact Zone: Human to More-Than-Human 125 8. Is This Gitmo or Club Med? 137 9. Authoritarianism 2020: Lessons from Chile 144 Part II. Coloniality, Indigeneity, and the Traffic in Meaning 10. The Ethnographer's Arrival 165 11. Rigoberta Menchú and the Geopolitics of Truth 189 12. The Politics of Reenactment 207 13. Translation, Contagion, Infiltration 220 14. Thinking across the Colonial Divide 234 15. The Futurology of Independence 251 16. Remembering Anticolonialism 265 Coda: Airways, the Politics of Breath 276 Notes 281 References 299 Index 323 Publication History 339
Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor, Emerita, of Spanish and Portuguese and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, at Stanford University. She is coeditor of Trumpism, Mexican America, and the Struggle for Latinx Citizenship and author of Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.
"Planetary Longings offers, among other things, a firsthand intellectual history of the past three decades, examining the consequences for thinkers and activists of a newly totalizing capitalism bent on despoiling the earth."
~Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Critical Inquiry
"Mary Louise Pratt is a profound and important thinker and a superb essayist. . . ."
~Ryne Clos, Spectrum Culture
"Planetary Longings is Mary Louise Pratt in her prime. A profound historical thinker, global intellectual, and reader rooted in Latin American studies, Pratt invites us in this book to witness the tumultuous and changing history of Latin America—and with it, crucially, the discipline of Latin American cultural studies—over the past forty years. . . . In this book, the complex intersections between literary criticism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, and sociolinguistics are brought within our reach in readable and vigorous prose, in which a sharp sense of humor is combined with a vibrant and optimistic invitation to read, think, and listen to the forces that move the world."
~Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, A Contracorriente
Planet Now! Conversations in Environmental Studies | Planetary Longings with Mary Louise Pratt
The Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University welcomed cultural theorist and New York University professor emerita Mary Louise Pratt in a conversation on Jan. 18, 2023, about her new book, "Planetary Longings." The discussion was part of the center's Planet Now! Conversations in Environmental Studies series.
Rice University's Joseph Campana, the William Shakespeare Professor of English and director of the center, Gisela Heffes, professor of Latin American Literature and Culture in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures, and Weston Twardowski, program manager of the Diluvial Houston Initiative in the Center for Environmental Studies and Humanities Research Center, participated in the discussion.
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