“This is a particularly timely collection. Indeed, one could read this book as a kind of performative description of a conceptual field that it wishes to bring into existence, and it succeeds admirably. The Planetary Turn gathers together sophisticated and innovative contributions to the topic.”—John Frow, author of The Practice of Value: Essays on Literature in Cultural Studies
"The collective project of The Planetary Turn stakes a claim to being a field-defining contribution to the burgeoning efforts in recent years to come to grips with the monumental and unprecedented changes of our historical moment. The rich and wide-ranging essays collected in the pages of this volume make an impassioned appeal for the heuristic value of the conceptual matrix—derived from the work of Gayatri Spivak, Masao Miyoshi, Wai Chee Dimock, and others—of planetarity for thinking in wholly new ways the ethical labor of contemporary culture as located beyond the historical and spatial boundaries of both modernity and the nation-state and as an effective alternative to the reigning paradigms of globalization and cosmopolitanism. The book is destined to be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding where planetary culture stands today and where some of the most productive directions in it could, or perhaps should, take it." —Phillip E. Wegner, author of Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative
"...this sophisticated 12-chapter volume... is a valuable staging post towards alternative imaginations of geography: relational spaces of worldly reciprocity and flow that confound established coordinates. Perhaps the strongest part of this book is the editors’ introductory framing of planetarity, which offers a panoramic view of the concept’s intellectual history and its clashes and overlaps with theories of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. This is important reading for scholars of planetarity discourse... the book feeds into a larger poetic and political project of reimagining world geographies that exceed capitalist globalisation." —Cultural Geographies