AustLit

'Interest among writers in conceptions of the planetary is far from a recent phenomenon. Srinivas Aravamudan, for instance, has discussed how “interplanetary reflections” were a staple of intellectual life during the Enlightenment, when astronomical attempts to explicate rotations of the planets worked as a corollary to the geographical exploration of distant lands that was also characteristic of this era.1 Hester Blum has similarly emphasized how “theories of planetarity” are freighted with “a historical specificity” through her discussion of John Cleves Symmes’s appropriation of Arctic space in his highly idiosyncratic geophysical inquiries of the 1820s, which involved attempts to discover a hollow interior to the Earth.2 In this sense, there is a possibility that twenty-first-century debates around “a turn to the planet,” in the title of a celebrated essay by Masao Miyoshi, may risk foreshortening complex cultural and historical perspectives by focusing so insistently on one irreducible, all-encompassing sphere, as if the planet were a fundamental trope, like the one true god. Miyoshi’s 2001 essay does evoke specific material and political concerns: “global neoliberalism,” the importance of class, the way the world is “deterritorialized” for the rich but “sectioned into nations and nationalities for those who cannot afford to move or travel beyond their home countries.” Nevertheless, Miyoshi ultimately goes on to argue that in light of “the all-involving process of air pollution, ozone layer depletion, ocean contamination, toxic accumulation, and global warming,” the very concept of “literary studies” has now been reduced to “one basis and goal: to nurture our common bonds to the planet—to replace the imaginaries of exclusionist familialism, communitarianism, nationhood, ethnic culture, regionalism, ‘globalization,’ or even humanism, with the ideal of planetarianism.”3 Along parallel lines, Wai Chee Dimock has suggested that, in relation to ecology and “the non-negotiability of our physical end,” the idea of the “planetary” involves a sense of scale that challenges “the territoriality of the nationstate,” bound as the latter customarily is to protectionist understandings of sovereignty.4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak likewise distinguishes between the words “planet” and “world” or “globe,” which latter terms are, in Spivak’s 144 Paul Giles account, more beholden to “the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere,” in “the gridwork of electronic capital.”' (Introduction)