Planetary/Peripheral Appalachia

One of the characters in William Gibson’s science fiction novel The Peripheral describes the timeline-manipulating technology around which the story turns as a way of “third-worlding” the past. By sending information back and forth across time, the users of the technology, in our future, outsource work to inhabitants of their past (our near-present). An entire world becomes the “third world” for another world, home to cheap labor and expendable resources. The characters this happens to in the novel live in Appalachia, a choice that works in part to ground the otherwise cosmic scale of timeline manipulation and global catastrophe while also providing a lens through which to view the marginalization of humanity. Taking this fictional work as inspiration for real-world conceptualizations of planetary crises, Appalachia lends a tangibility to planetary thinking that also reorients “the planetary” away from an all-encompassing move that would purport to remove context. This article seeks to develop an understanding of the planetary that does the opposite: instead of removing context or flattening complexity, a planetary perspective should provide ways of grappling with and confronting the multitudes that make up what we might think of as a singular “planet.”