Planetary Longings

“These brilliant essays bring cultural theory to life. Mary Louise Pratt thinks 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

"Planetary Longings offers, among other things, a firsthand intellectual history of the past three decades, examining the consequences for thinkers and activists of a newly totalizing capitalism bent on despoiling the earth." - Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Critical Inquiry

"Mary Louise Pratt is a profound and important thinker and a superb essayist. . . ." - Ryne Clos, Spectrum Culture

"Planetary Longings is Mary Louise Pratt in her prime. A profound historical thinker, global intellectual, and reader rooted in Latin American studies, Pratt invites us in this book to witness the tumultuous and changing history of Latin America—and with it, crucially, the discipline of Latin American cultural studies—over the past forty years. . . . In this book, the complex intersections between literary criticism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, and sociolinguistics are brought within our reach in readable and vigorous prose, in which a sharp sense of humor is combined with a vibrant and optimistic invitation to read, think, and listen to the forces that move the world." - Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, A Contracorriente

"Pratt effectively demonstrates a way of reimagining scholarship in relation to Latin America while also providing an interesting reading experience. This collection will be particularly useful to teachers of global studies and to postcolonial scholars looking to expand their knowledge of anti-colonial and decolonial thought." - Jessi Rae Morton, symploke

“Planetary Longings reminds me again that what was so electrifying was the conceptual dexterity of Pratt’s work—its ability to develop concepts and frameworks that roved across disciplines and compelled scholars of di?erent stripes to consider them in relation to their own work. Pratt’s most recent book exempli?es this in sixteen short, digestible entries.” - Dante LaRiccia, H-Environment, H-Net Reviews

"The most important feature of the book, in my opinion, is its gaze towards the future even as it examines the present and the past It is in instances of the past and the present that Pratt seeks a hopeful possibility of the future. . . . Her book redraws disciplinary boundaries and introduces new concepts while reorienting older ones, and like any genuine, complex piece of scholarship, asks ethically complicated questions without the pretense of having answers to them." - Abhimanyu Acharya, Crime Fiction Studies

"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)." - Jennifer Wenzel, Comparative Literature Studies