Decolonising the Global

In now decades-old theories of globalisation, numerous scholars have placed weight on the conceptual impact of the first images of our planet seen from the perspective of the moon. The photographs, taken during the Apollo 8 space mission and known collectively as Earthrise, offered a nascent glimpse of the earth as a single sphere.

From a lunar vantage point, hustle-and-bustle megacities appeared as silent clusters of twinkling lights. Oceans seemed like glossy blue fields touching the curved edges of green and brown swaths of land – now visible, now hidden – as clouds formed, hovered and changed shape. This vision of a singular container of human life, unbroken and unbothered by national borders, seemed to give geological credence to a philosophical and political cosmopolitanism. As in the hopeful geo-universalism of Immanuel Kant: “For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.” Centuries later, seeing the whole from above became possible in step with terrestrial travel and information technologies that crisscrossed the land, sea and air, fusing the continents, connecting household to household in new forms of remote intimacy. In the words of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan: “The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.”

In each case, from Kant to McLuhan, we hear calls to rethink the relationship between self and other – politically, ethically – through a broadened concept of what constitutes home: the earth itself serving as a shared dwelling place. What is more, the ethics of a global environmentalism grew too from these images of a single earth. For in a dark plot twist, the very technologies that allowed us to connect threatened to destroy the beauty and even the viability of our shared planetary village. Thus, the vocabulary of collective green stewardship emerged to further enrich the centuries-old language of transnational cooperation.

Such calls to think and act in a global key, however, have sometimes side-stepped the extent to which images of the “globe” and the “global” – long before Earthrise – also occupied the fantasies of imperialisms. We might think of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) when the Spanish and Portuguese empires apportioned the known earth into two parts. Or, we could recall the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) when the major European imperial powers surveyed and divided the earth’s still unconquered territories between themselves. In each case, a specific vision of the whole world preceded or justified imperial efforts to subjugate and remake other territories using a uniform template.The very concept of a global society continued both to reflect and in some cases to reinforce inequitable international distributions of power and resources. 

Compared to these explicit conquests, it might be tempting to read late twentieth-century references to the unified earth as somehow signifying a break with the world-ordering impulses of formal imperialism. After all, the global village thesis as well as the genre of environmentalism inaugurated with Earth Day (1970) emerged alongside decolonisation – the historical process by which once colonised peoples gained political sovereignty. And yet, as postcolonial studies scholars have long argued, those discourses of cultural, political and ecological unity often carried the same Eurocentric and universalist assumptions that undergirded imperialism to begin with. In other words, the very concept of a global society continued both to reflect and also in some cases to reinforce inequitable international distributions of power and resources. Some scholarly texts, such as Ha-Joon Chang’s provocative Kicking Away the Ladder, have even argued that global climate change objectives created fresh obstacles for developing countries seeking to close the North-South wealth gap.

Rather than taking sides here, what we can gain from thinking with such critical perspectives is a sense of how the globe is not just a place, but has a historical existence as a highly contested and frequently politicised idea. For instance, even the conceptual impact of Earthrise can’t be fully decoupled from the tense geopolitical context of the Cold War or the space race. This leads to another interrogation: if the very concept of the global is covered with now hidden, now explicit fingerprints of political and economic imperialism, can we ever speak of globality in neutral terms? What framework remains for making sense of the increasingly transnational nature of our lives, including the ecological consequences of a capitalist modernity?

As one tentative answer, the renowned postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak has suggested we replace the term global with that of planetarity. Notice, she does not say planetary but rather planet-ar-ity, which mobilises the suffix ity to imply an ongoing condition. Most importantly, the framework of planetarity accounts for what we might call the “facts” of the global condition, without folding them into a hegemonic fantasy of perfect unity. In Death of a Discipline, she states: “I propose the planet to overwrite the globe…. The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it.” Here then to decolonise the global in the frame of planetarity is not to arrive at a clear and simple guiding principle for steering the human community to a specific end point. It is an orientation rather than an objective. It is more like a collection of short stories than a novel.If the very concept of the global is covered with now hidden, now explicit fingerprints of political and economic imperialism, can we ever speak of globality in neutral terms? 

Of course, this still leaves us with other concerns. In an era of conspicuous climate change, it might seem dangerous to divest intellectually of cohesive narratives at the planetary scale. However, Spivak’s point can be followed to the opposite conclusion: any “natural”, unexamined or overly abstract vision of the earth can end up undermining rather than advancing the nitty-gritty work of environmentalism. Planetarity is a practice of reading and thinking about innumerable webs of interaction that spill across borders, without giving in to reductionist theologies of “one world”. Such silhouettes might be ideologically satisfying, but they rarely help us account for the fuller network effects of our multitudinous words and deeds at any given moment, in any given place.

To conclude, planetarity is also different than a mere affirmation of a positive multiculturalism; it is something closer to labour than to the pomp and circumstance of a concluding ceremony. We (all) occupy the planet, and yet can never speak of that occupancy as a single phenomenon, nor can we describe it with a single voice. So, we are left with the continual efforts of transcribing and translating the constraints and possibilities of so many lifeworlds shaped and yet uncontained by borders. Following Spivak, such is also the nature of the work of resisting all manner of imperialisms old and new, near and far. Perhaps the root principle of planetarity (and so of anti-imperialism) is a form of awe. Awe for that which eludes even the most forceful grasp, including the earth’s fragile splendours.