The Millenial Pivot: From Globality to Planetarity
The 1990s were the heyday of the “post” — postmodern, posthuman, postcolonial, postcapitalist, and so on. The post- assumed a subject with its back to the future, looking on things past that were now available for analysis in new ways. The turn of the millennium, this presentation argues, brought a pivot toward the future, more specifically toward a crisis of futurity tied to the unfolding climate catastrophe. This was simultaneously a pivot from the global to the planetary, marked by a new prefix, the “geo-”, as in geohumanities, geoesthetics, and so on. Drawn from Mary Louise Pratt’s new book, this presentation examines the pivot, and the work of knowledgemaking in the face of radical uncertainty and challenges of scale.
Mary Louise Pratt
Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, where she teaches Latin American literature and cultural theory. She holds degrees in comparative literature and linguistics from the University of Toronto, the University of Illinois, and Stanford University. She has published extensively on the subjects of Latin American women’s writing; travel literature and imperialism; language and militarization; and modernity and neoliberalism. She has been affiliated with the Hemispheric Institute since 2002.