Planetary Longings

Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation was among the handful of paperbacks I bought in 1992, having decided to become a scholar of postcolonial studies. (The others were Edward W. Said’s Orientalism [1978], Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s In Other Worlds [1988], and Henry Louis Gates’ “Race,” Writing, and Difference [1986].) Pratt’s seminal account of the contact zone as a site of geographic and cultural imagining propelled my thinking about the politics of space and the work of narrative in the world. I returned to Imperial Eyes at another pivotal moment: the mid-2000s emergence of postcolonial ecocriticism. Re-reading Pratt, I marveled at her anticipation of environmental questions that postcolonial studies had supposedly ignored. Pratt’s idea of “planetary consciousness”—a European expansionist imaginary—provides a grounded, critical counter to more ethereal notions of planetarity that subsequently became influential. Pratt’s planet is not the same as Spivak’s, and the gap between them offers a productive space for thought. I begin this review with Imperial Eyes to identify lines of continuity and difference across Pratt’s thinking. Her early analysis of “planetary consciousness” has broadened to consider “planetary longings”: desires for a future common world in myriad sites beyond Europe, across the past half-millennium.Planetary Longings comprises an introduction and sixteen chapters, plus a June 2020 coda on “the politics of breath.” Many of the chapters originated as articles published over the past two decades. And yet, Planetary Longings is much more than a collection of essays. This study of colonialism and decolonization, written with admirable clarity and warmth, coheres around two related ideas: “futurology” and crises of futurity, and Elizabeth Grosz’s meta-reflections on what concepts are and do. Pratt explains that for Grosz, concepts are worldly and historical, bound up with particular problems, for which they offer not ready-made solutions but instead “alternatives to the present, by enabling the imagining of possibilities” (13). Different concepts enable or disable different futures, as Pratt demonstrates by tracing “life spans” of concepts including modernity, contact zone, Indigeneity, the Anthropocene, and independence.The first of the book’s two sections focuses on a particular crisis of futurity, the 1990s millennial transition, which, as Pratt reminds us, also marked the quincentennial of Columbus’ first voyage; the end of the Cold War and the ascendancy of neoliberalism, globalization, and hypermobility; and the climax of a “knowledge revolution” (24) that transformed the Western academy. The second section, on coloniality and Indigeneity, looks further back in time as it measures the persistence of coloniality in the present.Many—but not all—of Pratt’s examples are drawn from Latin America, which is a vantage point rather than merely a topic: Pratt explains, “This is not a book ‘about’ the Americas. It is about a range of planetarized processes, forces, and aspirations, observed from and thought about mainly from the Americas . . . . I think from the Americas about the planet” (6). Pratt’s breadth and depth of expertise as a Latin Americanist are evident in her nimble juxtaposition of examples spanning the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, or in bravura readings of 1990s experimental novels from Colombia, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. But the scope of her analysis ranges far beyond the Americas, weaving together insights from far-flung thinkers including Said, Spivak, and Homi Bhabha; Roberto Schwarz, Aníbal Quijano, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Sandy Grande; Francis Nyamnjoh and Molefi Kete Asante; and Anna Tsing, Elizabeth Povinelli, and J. K. Gibson-Graham. Pratt bridges disparate histories and genealogies; her discussion of Indigeneity looks to the Philippines, India, Taiwan, and various sites in Africa. In a standout chapter on formal continuities between colonial travel narratives and ethnography, Pratt deploys her vast, granular knowledge of traditions in sites of European exploration across the globe; another chapter incisively observes that recent migration narratives reanimate tropes from earlier travel literature, with the poignant distinction that their protagonists tend to be those who did not survive the journey.Planetary Longings is also a book about thought: how it works and what it is for; what it can make happen (as a “force,” Pratt might say) by stretching beyond the known and the given. Pratt foregrounds the politics of knowledge and the “traffic in meaning” through deft shifts in perspective—whether historically, between past and present; disciplinarily, between anthropology and literary studies; institutionally, between the U.S. academy and peripheral locations; or in the vast and varied worlds beyond the academy, where she continually finds instructive “practices of knowledge making and signification” (4). For Pratt, the peripheral, marginal, or seemingly trivial is an ever-surprising source of insight; the pulse of the present and anticipations of the future are to be found in popular culture, particularly in vernacular acts of “world-making,” “the actions, practices, and creations by which people craft meaningful realities and stories for themselves . . . even as they contend with hostile circumstances” (8). This twinned, nuanced gesture is classic Pratt: as with her early insistence that the contact zone is a site of both creativity and violence, she is alert to the social and epistemological consequences of not naming colonialism and imperialism. Across these chapters recurs the indispensable observation that studies of imperialism tend to remain trapped within the traffic lines of power that shape the objects of study. The same complexity is at work in numerous revelatory juxtapositions, such as the surprising parallels between the eighteenth-century colonial Spanish judge Jose Antonio de Areche and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. (When Pratt notes that Geertz’s thinking about cultural otherness is inflected by ideas about “the moral imagination” from “his literary mentor, Lionel Trilling” [226], one can recognize Geertz as an important precursor for Pratt’s own generative straddling of literary studies and ethnography.) A comparatist at heart, Pratt never becomes so enamored of a trope that she ignores crucial differences and complications.This nuance and attention to the stakes of knowledge are epitomized in the remarkable chapter on Rigoberta Menchú, which begins by asserting that Menchú’s testimonio “attracted a worldwide reception that undoubtedly saved many Guatemalan lives, including [her] own” (189). These life-and-death consequences of narrative provide an ethical frame for Pratt’s multifaceted argument about how Reagan-era culture wars and post-1960s transformations of the U.S. university set the stage for highly publicized controversies about Menchú, including anthropologist David Stoll’s notorious exposé. Menchú is the kind of subaltern knowledge producer that recurs across Pratt’s oeuvre, but here Pratt also considers another fateful site of meaning-making beyond the academy: U.S. media blitzes that amplified noise around books that few had actually read. She suggests that, unlike most academics, Stoll was able to master the soundbite and caught a culture war wave. As a literary critic, Pratt notices similarities between testimonio and exposé as genres with a complex relationship to empirical truth. Noting that “many of his most dramatic claims are not borne out by his own findings,” Pratt laments the “masterpiece” that Stoll could have written had he embraced the complexities of “finding truth in the aftermath of genocidal violence” rather than positing himself as the heroic rescuer of plain facts (203). What does it mean for a book to succeed or fail?—a different question from how many readers it finds. Pratt contrasts Stoll’s sensational publishing success with his profound ethical failure in claiming to discredit Menchú, yet she also acknowledges Menchú’s own rhetorical transgression of metropolitan norms regarding life narratives as the stories of individuals. Menchú succeeded at writing a gripping narrative, yet also risked the kind of delegitimization that U.S. conservatives were itching to undertake.Pratt’s assessment of Stoll is unflinching yet also remarkably generous: his book, she notes, is more complicated than its sensationalist prologue and Stoll’s media appearances would indicate. This generosity resounds throughout Planetary Longings, beginning with a deeply personal section of the introduction that recalls Pratt’s youth in rural Canada, which gave her at least a partial experience of what it means to be peripheral and colonial, as well as a Commonwealth sense of belonging to a wider world: “The periphery’s powers include the ironic task of enlightening the center about itself” (43), she writes later, in a chapter contrasting metropolitan and peripheral formulations of modernity.Not only generous, Planetary Longings is also generational and generative. Pratt is a veteran of the “knowledge revolution” that swept the academy in its “pre-postcolonial moment,” which was connected to broader social movements (24, 15). Of the 1970s generation that “lived the change,” she writes: “We learned to think surrounded by anti-imperial, anticolonial, antiracist, antipatriarchal, antiauthoritarian struggles” (24). This book’s timely achievement is its careful and energetic thinking between that moment and our “post-progress” present: Pratt’s is an explicitly generational perspective that welcomes new readers engaged in similar fights today. Grosz’s idea of concepts having life spans allows Pratt to offer parallax views of the forces behind the emergence of an older concept and its significance now, as in her rewriting of the iconic Zapatista uprising in the twenty-first century idiom of decolonization.Indeed, in Pratt’s account, what distinguishes the present is the efflorescence of Indigenous thought and the acceleration of the planetary environmental crisis. The future has always been in crisis for someone, as this book suggests in its study of diverse futurologies, and now “What is at stake is the future of the earth and all its beings” (116). Anthropocene talk of humans having become a geological force inspires Pratt’s inventive account of Indigeneity as a planetary force (“able to create agency and make things happen” [113]) and a historical relation that emerges with dispossession and extraction rather than a primordial state of being. For Pratt, the Anthropocene is a future-directed concept and narrative chronotope: “A tangle of predictability and unpredictability hums at its heart” (118–119). A brilliant reading of Planet of the Apes, with its nonhuman retrospection about human futures, resonates with her discussion of other thinkers’ expansion of her contact zone concept to analyze multispecies encounters, which Pratt further expands to consider how “non-animate actors determine the conditions for life and death of all living things” (135). As with her original insistence on the violence of the contact zone, Pratt’s wondrous curiosity about nonhuman forces (including NYC rats) never loses sight of human agency. When these forces combine, they constitute what Pratt calls a “force field” (136)—a term that has not yet caught on, but may be more perspicacious than the Latourian assemblage.If I have a quibble with Planetary Longings, it is the treatment of postcolonial studies, a crucial strand of the knowledge revolution so vividly recalled here. Pratt’s claims about its blindness and quietism are sometimes overstated, echoing distortions in some recent decolonial scholarship that rebrands the more radical strands of postcolonial thought as “decolonial” and then castigates postcolonial studies for ignoring those concerns. Charting the gulf between actually existing decolonization and independence, on the one hand, and unrealized dreams of liberation, on the other, has long been a fundamental task of postcolonial studies. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Pratt’s account of Indigeneity as a historical relation is its unremarked isomorphism with Fanon’s and Sartre’s accounts of the native in The Wretched of the Earth. This caveat aside, the gifts of Planetary Longings are innumerable, and I have never stopped learning how to be a planetary postcolonialist from Mary Louise Pratt. Hers is an indispensably clear-eyed yet encouraging voice as “we humans figure out how to live the living and dying that lies before us” (29).

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