Writing the Planetary

We live in a planetary age, the Earth looming large and beginning to rupture under the demands that certain humans have been making of it. In the late 1980s environmental historian Donald Worster called on historians to write two histories: the history of their own country (or other specialisation) and planetary history: ‘the history of all peoples colliding and cooperating with one another on a shrinking island in space.’ A quarter of the way into a century in which sober voices have predicted the collapse of human civilisations, we suggest that now all history is planetary, and all stories are planetary stories. This workshop asks how we write them.

 

We invite expressions of interest from EMCRs and HDR students and other writers who are wrestling with the planetary in their work, in environmental history, the history of science, technology, health and medicine, in economic, political history, national, local, or any history or storytelling which draws on history, in which planetary themes and processes enter the foreground, or the planet emerges as a main actor. We encourage applications from those who want to write the planetary, even if they have not yet figured out how.

 

For the planetary immediately confronts us with problems of scale and complexity. The global is a fiction of communication, mobility, and control, Gayatri Spivak points out, and largely unsullied by actual humans.No one lives there, and the human actors inglobal history tend to be those who have imagined the globe and sought to institutionalise, or realise, it But the planet, increasingly, has a presence and materiality that are hard to ignore. It sustains all human life, and all kinds of life. It has space for the noisy clash of languages and narratives. Here we come up against the second glaring problem in writing the planetary: profound, almost prohibitive, complexity. Apart from a few astrophysical exceptions, the planetary is a container for all the histories we could imagine writing – and it is not even, or uniform, or even, fact, round. It is multitudinous, polyphonous, and profoundly differentiated. But we can hardly write the history of everything, everywhere, all at once. How do we find and follow a path through?

 

We soon come to a still deeper and more foundational problem. Our other histories allow us to take up positions either of identification or separation; we are part of our subjects or apart from them. But in the planetary we are both. Spivak, again: ‘alterity remains underived from us’ if we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects. ‘It is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away – and thus to think of it is already to transgress’. We need to carefully navigate the planetary turn, with considered ‘planetary thinking.’ This is the predicament of ‘terrestrials amid terrestrials,’ as Latour calls us all, learning together to inhabit a new Earth.

 

However great and complex, we take it that the planet, and the planetary, are already here, as agent and subject in our lives and stories. We need to find the means of writing the planet, even as we are still learning what ‘it’ may be: ‘feeling our way in a world we don’t know.’ In this workshop, therefore, we are joined by leading historians who have written planetary histories. Warwick Anderson, Tom Griffiths, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin will discuss the way they have navigated the planetary in their own work and respond to the efforts of early and mid-career historians and others to story the Earth, and ourselves within and part of it.

 

We are pleased to be able to offer modest support for domestic travel for those who are invited to participate.

 

Please send a 250–300 word expression of interest in this discussion and practice-focused workshop, describing how you are writing the planetary, or how you want to be in your work, together with a 100-word biographical statement, to james.dunk@sydney.edu.au by Wednesday 25 September.