Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (review)

Although risky business, prophecies are nonetheless tempting. So here is one: looking back on the past two decades, the literary-cultural historians of the future—a future not too remote from us, I would think—will in all likelihood see those years as a sort of epistemological intermezzo, a moment of transition from one paradigm to another across the humanities, inside and outside the U.S. It seems to me that a gradual shift has been underway in the human sciences over the last twenty-five years. Concomitant and analogous to recent reorientations in literature, the arts, and geopolitical arrangements, this shift has touched off the progressive albeit uneven legitimizing and academic-intellectual institutionalization of something that might be viewed as a new episteme, a new way of looking at the surrounding world and of producing knowledge about this world.

A good number of influential voices in theory, criticism, and cultural studies, in comparative analysis (especially in “new comparatism”), in philosophy (chiefly in ethics), in psychoanalysis (primarily among the “Champ lacanien” group members), in political science, economics, sociology (principally in risk sociology), and in geography have been in the avant-garde of this sea change, having variously anticipated it from the beginning of their careers (Jean-Luc Nancy, Sylviane Agacinski, Guy Scarpetta, Paul Gilroy, Marc C. Taylor, David Hollinger). Others joined this transformative trend a bit later (Jacques Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov, Jürgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva) as they turned to cosmopolitan, “postnational,” global, planetary, and “other” (“alterity”-focused) questions years prior to the historical watershed of this transitional interval, the official end of the Cold War. Similarly, many scholars have been associated with older directions such as postmodernism (Jean Baudrillard), postcolonialism (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, K. Anthony Appiah), poststructuralism, and deconstruction (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, J. Hillis Miller). Still others took the lead right before and after 1989 in fields such as comparative and translation scholarship (Henry Sussman, Timothy J. Reiss, Eugene Eoyang, Rey Chow, Yunte Huang, Zhang Longxi, Emily Apter, Lawrence Venuti, Michael Cronin); cosmopolitanism, world governance, sovereignty, and human rights (Bruce Robbins, Pheng Cheah, Danilo Zolo, Derek Heater, Seyla Benhabib, Will Kymlicka, Daniele Archibugi, José María Rosales, María José Fariñas Dulce, Timothy Brennan, Amanda Anderson, Kok-Chor Tan, Volker Heins, Camilla Fojas, and many more); “cosmocultural,” “geocritical,” “ecocritical,” and “planetary” analysis (Franco Moretti, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gérard Raulet, Bertrand Westphal, Wai Chee Dimock, Lawrence Buell); global, world-system, “network society,” and “empire” studies of various persuasions and foci (Manuel Castells, Arjun Appadurai, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Steven Shaviro, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Amy Kaplan, Roland Robertson, Martin Albrow, David Held, Frederick Buell). Further, some of these are, I suspect, relatively comfortable with the disciplinary tags usually attached to their interventions: Ulrich Beck and Jacques Demorgon (sociology), Peter Singer and Appiah again (ethics). Others, such as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Georgio Agamben, await, perhaps in vain, classifications less nebulous than “philosophy.” Additionally, critics like Charles Taylor, Hollinger, Werner Sollors, Benedict Anderson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Charles Johnson, Stuart Hall, Aiwa Ong, John Carlos Rowe, James Clifford, and Giles Gunn, who broke new ground in race, ethnicity, citizenship, community, ethnography, and multicultural studies ten or twenty years ago, in hindsight appear even more forward-looking. Finally, issues such as those intensely addressed by virtually all of the above have rekindled interest in a number of classics, ancient and modern, in philosophy (Stoicism, Spinoza, Husserl, Buber, Levinas), hermeneutics (Gadamer and Ricoeur), psychoanalysis (Lacan), sociology (Tönnies and Simmel), the history of ideas and ideologies (Benda and, more recently, George Steiner, Stephen Toulmin, and Peter Coulmas), anthropology (Clifford Geertz), literary-cultural and discourse studies (Bakhtin), justice theory (Rawls and his “law of people”), history and political economy (Immanuel Wallerstein and, via his work, Braudel and the Annales).

Such wide-ranging scholarship revolves systematically and characteristically around the concept of connectedness, of being in, and thus being...