Abstract:

The planetary turn signals a change of perspective, a reconfiguration of the way we view and relate to the world. Min Hyoung Song sees this as an attempt to entertain “a different order of connection,” one that cancels out the “royal epistemology” of globalization, a nomos that divides, restricts, hierarchalizes, and criminalizes” (“Becoming Planetary” 568). In The Planetary Turn, Amy Elias and Christian Moraru suggest that such a “reorientation” would bring about a significant change of perspective, one that should lead “to notably different outcomes in and for the world” (xvi). They explain that “to comprehend the planetary must entail grasping the relationality embedded in it. Consequently, relatedness, dialogue, and interactivity are central to major aesthetic initiatives stirring at this stage in world history” (xii). Literature is instrumental in bringing about such a change of perspective. It allows us to imagine ways of being there and being with that might be unlike our existing modes of engagement and orientation. It is in the work of the imagination that Gayatri Spivak anchors her definition of the ethical imperative underlying a transition to the planetary. She writes: “If we imagine ourselves as planetary accidents rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us, it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away” (An Aesthetic Education 339). If we need to call on the imagination as a path to alterity it is because, unlike the global, the planetary is not the instantiation of the same everywhere. The planetary is an awareness of difference that does not demand that it conform to what we know. To be planetary is to recognize, to acknowledge and to allow for difference. It is a method of living with difference rather than eradicating it. Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is poised between these two cultural moments: between the global and the planetary, between the different and the same, between flights of the imagination and the reassertion of the known. Though the novel launches a critique against the brutality and indifference entailed in neocolonial imperialism, it remains committed to a globalist ethos when it gestures toward the abject quality of the different. My reading will show where the novel insists on the same and where it stages an encounter with alterity that can be read with the moral imperative announced in the ...