ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses an emergent cosmopolitanism consisting in a pluriscalar fraternity demanded by the climatic and planetary chaos of global capitalism. Many contemporary voices have sketched the lines of its possibility in the literary and cultural field. The spiraling rise of social inequalities and ecological devastation, that is uprooting the world, breeds a chaos from which its beneficiaries believe they can protect themselves by erecting walls. But the Earth is stirring with movements to which we must be attentive, listening to plural and sensitive migrating narratives rather than trusting the “objective” and disengaged surveillance of the data. In the archipelago formed by Édouard Glissant, Vandana Shiva, Alain Damasio, Yoko Tawada, Sony Labou Tansi, Olga Tokarczuk, Wu Ming-yi, or Erri De Luca, together with other lesser-known, or sometimes anonymous voices, a clear aspiration to a postcolonial, anti-extractivist justice is manifest. It proposes a more balanced citizenship at the scale of the Earth, ways of stopping the separation of causes from consequences, an alternative to the hegemonic narrative of a rescue that consists in cutting humankind from its earthly habitat. From Noah’s ark to the “spaceship Earth,” an end must be put to this off-ground flight that denies reality.
