Escaping Cosmopolis: Planetary Quilombo and the Question of the Outside

What are we to make of the modern cosmopolitan promise of a good common world in the face of the planetary upheavals we associate with climate change? Critically revisiting Immanuel Kant’s writings on cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace alongside aspects of the colonial history of what has been called “the Columbian Exchange,” this chapter probes the proposition that, rather than a regulative ideal to be redeemed for a brave new earth, the cosmopolitan imagination might come to be seen as having shaped this epoch of planetary catastrophe instead of delivering us from it. Waging that learning to live tenaciously in terrains of historic and planetary transition may require more collective improvisation than normative regulation, more fragmentary experimentation than world-administration, the chapter speculatively explores the question of cosmopolitanism’s immanent outside. Engaging the history of fugitive practices of quilombo or marronage across the Americas, it asks what a departure, an escape, from Cosmopolis might take on an earth rendered forever unstable and unsafe. In this way, it proposes the notion of “planetary quilombo” as a speculative infrastructure through which to read present conditions of habitation otherwise, and to imagine forms of social life improvised on an earth out of joint with itself, in the absence of a common world.