Description
Book SynopsisTracing colonialism alongside the history of anticolonial struggles in the Americas, Mary Louise Pratt shows how the turn of the twenty-first century marks a catastrophic turning point in the human and planetary condition.
Trade Review"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 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
