José Augusto Pádua

The climate of history - and, we may argue, of the social sciences and the humanities more broadly - has been changing in significant ways since the publication of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s groundbreaking article “The Climate of History: Four Theses” in 2009. With this exploration of how “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (2009, p. 201), Chakrabarty, the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, played a decisive role in making the Anthropocene a crucial category for scholars concerned about the human impact on the planet. While this piece sparked a range of debates and questions, such as the suitability of the term “species” in face of the deep social, economic, and political disparities at the heart of humans’ impact on the Earth, depictions of the ecological crisis in popular culture and media increasingly suggest humans are a geological force pushing the environment to the brink of collapse. In one way or another, they converge on what Chakrabarty has identified as the limitations of the critique of globalization, which does not address the planetary as an unescapable dimension of human affairs. On a more fundamental level, and already in conversation with the author’s more recent scholarship on the topic, our predicament is how to live in “an order that presently seems unimaginable: an order that is not necessarily human dominant” (2021, p. 195). This is one of the questions animating the chapters of the 2021 book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, in which Chakrabarty does not abandon the concept of Anthropocene, but makes the case for the planet as a more capacious category with which to address the type of questions asked and the methodologies developed by the humanities and social sciences. This can be seen as a new twist in Chakrabarty’s wide-ranging scholarship, including his renowned previous work on postcolonial studies epitomized in the book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000). The Climate of History once again raises the stakes of related debates by establishing the planet as a heuristic category where the personal, the biological, the political, and the geological intersect. What does it mean, for example, to reconsider the crossroads presented by the many modernizing waves that spread through the Global South in the twentieth century from the viewpoint of today’s planetary demands? How can we think from humanistic perspective about a planet that, contrary to the global, cannot be placed “in a communicative relationship with humans?” (2021, p. 70). What can the critical gesture of centering the planetary contribute to some of the most urgent questions, ideas, and anxieties stemming from the ecological crisis across a wide range of disciplines? In this interview, conducted on a cold day in the January of 2023 in Chicago, Chakrabarty offers us new insights onto this rich plethora of questions.