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.

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.

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