Climate change represents a deep conundrum for humans. It is difficult for humans to give up the unequal and yet accelerating pursuit of a good life based on an insatiable appetite for energy sourced mainly from fossil fuel. But the same pursuit, scientists insist, damages the geobiological system that supports the existence of interrelated forms of life, including ours, on this planet. The planet, seen thus, is one. The global sway of financial and extractive capital connects humans technologically, but they remain divided along multiple axes of inequality. Their worlds are many and their politics still global rather than planetary. In the narrative presented here, Chakrabarty continues to explore the temporal and intellectual fault lines that mark the collapse of the global and the planetary in human history.
This book provides a thought-provoking, complex discussion of how climate change challenges the humanities, history, and the human sense of time…
Choice
One Planet, Many Worlds displays the same critical ingenuity, analytical subtlety, polymathic erudition, and gravitas that one has come to expect from Chakrabarty. Those who engages its arguments attentively, even in dissent, will come away energized by the encounter with a strenuous and self-exacting thinker capable of ranging back and forth across a vertiginous range of disciplines from geology to phenomenology.
This book provides a thought-provoking, complex discussion of how climate change challenges the humanities, history, and the human sense of time...
Chakrabarty’s considerations of how human historical memory needs encompass nature are richer and more absorbing than this sketch can convey. Of all the books I’ve discussed here in 2023, One Planet, Many Worlds is the one that I expect to reread in the new year.
While this is only one book, there are many disciplines with which it engages, and it is Chakrabarty’s thoughtful and gifted writing-style that staves off any potential disciplinary disorientation. This book is a carefully curated and detailed philosophical tour through some of the most important issues of our time, and Chakrabarty does not rush: his attention is purposeful and revealing. I recommend this book to any readers who are ready for, and interested in, the kind of contemplative and complex political engagement that is needed to hold the tension of the global and the planetary.
In One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax, Dipesh Chakrabarty examines human interrelatedness with, and responsibility within, the Earth System from a decolonial perspective. Drawing on a diverse range of disciplines, this book is a critical intervention that considers perspectival gaps and differences around the climate crisis.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School. He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry, a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies, and has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture. His many books include The Crises of Civilization, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, and Provincializing Europe.
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