The Planetary Turn in Human History by Dipesh Chakrabarty

Lecture organized by Urban Studies in collaboration with the Institute for European Global Studies and the Department of History.

Dr. Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and a leading scholar of postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, and the planetary humanities. 

The lecture will begin by suggesting that when we look back at the last two decades of the twentieth century, we find two versions of human history being told at the same time but without reference to each other. One strand consisted of various efforts in the era of decolonization and imperial decline to find places for non-elites - people whom the British socialist G.D. H. Cole once called The Common People and Eric Wolf, The People Without History - in historical representations. "History from below" in England, "Everyday History" in the German-speaking world, indigenous histories in the settler-colonial nations, new histories of slavery,  "Subaltern History" in South Asia, feminist histories, and so on - all represented a global impetus directed towards democratizing the discipline of history. At the same time, however, there was yet another story about humans being told by scientists, especially earth-system scientists, from the 1980s on - this was the story of how humans, thanks to their numbers, technology, and growing levels of consumption, were becoming a geological agent, producing an excess of greenhouse gases that the normal carbon sinks of the planet could not absorb and that was warming up the surface temperature of the planet, producing the environmental problem that we today know by the name "climate change.” The two stories came together, both for humanist historians and for scientists, in the twenty-first century, giving rise to the idea that humans may be living on the cusp of two different periods in human history, the global and the planetary. The last part of the lecture will be devoted to explaining the difference between the global and the planetary as categories of historical analyses.

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