College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Liberal Arts and Sciences Liberal Arts and Sciences

Starting from the arguments presented in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent books The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021) and One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (2023), this talk will seek to explain why making a distinction between the globe and the planet as humanist categories calls for a new philosophical anthropology.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the founding member of the journal Subaltern Studies, a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry, a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies, and has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture. His books include Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021), and One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (July 2023).

Scales of Belonging: Speaker Series 2023-24
Recent years have given life an experimental feel. As interlocked and unpredictable sources of upheaval become the norm, we ask: how and where do we belong? Exiles and refugees may never belong where they make homes. Migrants may never feel at home where they belong. While some choices we make, others are made for us. People move—as much as they are moved by nature and politics. In another key, we are moved by things that affect us: literature, sports, the lives of others. If shared worlds make life meaningful, then what forces repair and rupture the possibility of community? From football fields and detention centers to the planet itself, the Center’s 2023-24 Speaker Series investigates our myriad Scales of Belonging.