Planetary Longings Pratt

planetary Longings |

Mary Louise Pratt

June 336 pages, 26 illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-1829-2 $27.95/£20.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1566-6 $104.95/£84.00

Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and Olive H. Palmore Professor of 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

MARY LOUISE PRATT

“These brilliant essays bring cultural theory to life. Mary Louise Pratt thinks from across the Americas, drawing us into a repertoire that every American should grasp. To decolonize the postcolonial legacy, she shows us how to think generously and rigorously as well as politically.”—ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING, coeditor of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene

“This scintillating collection of essays by Mary Louise Pratt is a beautifully voiced journey through the major debates in postcolonial and decolonial studies in Latin America as well as the canon wars in the North American academy. These frame the emergent category of indigeneity as a dynamic catalyst of art, social criticism, and world-making on the many margins of Euro-American modernity.”—ARJUN APPADURAI, Max Weber Global Professor, Bard Graduate Center

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 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 as both a key index of coloniality, neoliberal extraction, and ecological destruction, and 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.

DISSIDENT ACTS A series edited by Diana Taylor and Macarena Gómez-Barris