Planetary Longings

In Planetary Longings leading postcolonial theorist and Latin American scholar Mary Louise Pratt writes from the conviction that the turn of the millennium-the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty first-have marked a turning point in the human and planetary condition. The millennial pivot has called for new modes of imagining and knowledge-making, and has mobilized an array of planetarized processes, forces, and aspirations, which this book contemplates from the geohistorical terrain of the Americas. Planetary Longings studies the planetarized forces of coloniality, decolonization, and indigeneity in their pre- and post-millennial forms. A series of case studies traces the permutations of coloniality from eighteenth-century Andean colonial documents, to nineteenth-century narrative, through to twentieth-century ethnography and testimonio, and twenty-first-century film. The book likewise tracks the workings of anti-colonial and decolonizing forces from eighteenth-century rebellions through nineteenth- and-twentieth-century independence struggles to contemporary indigenous mobilizations and decolonial activism. It takes particular interest in the speculative, futurological dimensions of such projects. Indigeneity is a key through line in the book. In its newly planetarized mode, it ties together the triple catastrophe of coloniality, neoliberal extractivism, and ecological devastation--