The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (review)

The thoughtfully curated volume The Planetary Turn aims to theorize the revived discourse of the planetary as a critical rubric for contemporary cultural production. Coeditors Elias and Moraru invoke the term planetarity as a corrective to globalization and, more questionably, to cosmopolitanism. Defined as “a new structure of awareness,” planetarity challenges “globalization’s homogenizing pulsion” by recognizing ethical and environmental concerns in works of art (xi–xvi). They distinguish planetarity from cosmopolitanism on the basis that the latter accounts only for human relations, whereas the planet includes the nonhuman organic and inorganic matter of the earth. Thereby the planet is “the non-negotiable ecological ground for human and nonhuman life” which calls for stewardship, or a position of attending to the negative effects of the Anthropocene (xvi–xxiv). Despite these intentions, however, the contributions to the volume do not address nonhuman life nor earth’s inorganic matter, save for Wai Chee Dimock’s discussion of “ecological realism” in Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetic treatment of maggots and flies, which metonymically represent the death and rebirth of The Epic of Gilgamesh through circulation and adaptation. Thus, in primarily focusing on intersubjective relations, the volume all-to-willingly dispenses with the old categories of postmodernism and cosmopolitanism in favor of portmanteau neologisms without persuasively rendering the earlier terms insufficient.

The coeditors nonetheless draw an elegantly traceable line through contributors’ analyses of literary, filmic, and other media, ending with an interpretive “manifesto” by Moraru, all of which attend to questions of space and modes of relation among human beings. The contributions converge around a handful of reference points, including most prominently Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003), specifically her discussion of planetarity, referenced in all but two essays in the volume.

The first two chapters attend to literary form and planetary experience. John D. Pizer’s contribution to the volume investigates Goethean Weltliteratur and Novalis’s “proto-Weltliteratur planetary idealism.” He sees the latter as a more incisive means for interpreting Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada’s poetics, which are “[hyperaware] of the linguistic, and often translational dimension of inter-national human (mis)understanding” (18). Hester Blum examines scenes of maritime travel and description in the works of Thoreau and Melville. He finds such scenes to be oriented according to the vast, alternative space and time of the sea, lending a navigational sense to the turn of the book’s title.

The next two chapters address questions of digital media and the experience of virtual space. Elias considers the digital zone of the commons, as an alternative figure to both the nation-state and the globe, which generates a virtual environment for the planet. Through a study of Elinor Ostrom’s analysis of the commons, the discourse of open source software, and affect theory, Elias contends that these fail to show the ethical foundations undergirding the creation of common resources. Alan Kirby coins the term “digimodernism” to displace the “exhausted” term “postmodernism” and reframe our conceptions of culture since the 2000s according to the prevalence of digitized text, focusing on the online bookstore and the e-reader as new sites of “cyber” or “textual” “placelessness” (72–5).

The following two chapters explore filmic visions of the planet. Raoul Eshelman creates the term “performatism” to interpret Alejandro Iñárritu’s film Babel (2006); Laurie Edson reads Claire Denis’ Chocolat (1988) as exemplary of “a planetary ethics” since the film champions colonized subjects through its representational strategies.

Halfway through the volume, Dimock revisits the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh to measure its “effective life” in circulation since its collation into written cuneiform circa 1700 b.c.e. She elegantly reads the text’s survival into the contemporary moment through “redistribution, recombination, and recontextualization”—including novelistic, poetic, and dramatic adaptation—as “sustaining a planetary ecology and bringing newness into the world through the turns of decomposition and recomposition” (125). In...