Ethnoplanetarity: Contemporaneity and Scale in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz and El botón de nácar

Abstract

Focusing on the close articulation of cosmic spatiotemporalities with traumatic national histories in Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s films Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015), the chapter explores the theoretical, political, and aesthetic parameters of a post-global cultural production that ventures to detach itself from the homogenizing systemic logic of the globe as one. Operating on multiple scales at once and predicated on an expansive conception of “contemporaneity,” the films can be seen—in their twin attendance to a cosmological dimension and to the political histories of colonial and dictatorial violence in Chile—to instantiate a novel cultural paradigm of “ethnoplanetarity” that critically interrogates, and ultimately seeks to “overwrite” (Gayatri Spivak), the narrow parameters of a discourse of the globe.