Abstract: This talk explores Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of planetarity as a theoretical strategy that brings together the ethics of literary translation and the urgency of environmental justice. First articulated in 1997, planetarity emerges in Spivak’s work as a critique of ecological activism that translates environmental concerns into technocratic discourses of sustainability, serving the needs of neoliberal global capital. In contrast, planetarity insists on preserving the alterity of aboriginal worldviews—particularly their relationship to nature—as a site of radical untranslatability. For Spivak, this relation is “sacred,” not in a theological sense, but as a category that refuses incorporation into the reason-centered model of ecological custodianship promoted by capitalism. The sacred, in this sense, marks a zone of epistemic difference.

This paper traces the development of this idea through Spivak’s translation of Mahasweta Devi’s Bengali short story Pterodactyl. I show how Spivak’s reading and translation of the text enact a refusal to subsume tribal cosmologies into frameworks of progress or legibility. Instead, Pterodactyl becomes a scene where the ethical limits of translation and the politics of environmental justice converge.