Book Review: Planetary Specters: Race, Migration and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

in the Twenty-first Century has transformed my understanding of climate change. Turning the last page, I was left with a sense of gratitude. Ahuja is an astute and skillful researcher and I highly recommend this book to anyone trying to make sense of the most colossal topic of our time. Defaulting to thinking climate change is primarily about environmental processes, or that we are all in it together, are likely tendencies given the deluge of writing and talking that continues to rest on these presumptions. This book is a gift to broaden our understanding because it so carefully and persuasively deconstructs these dominant narratives, teaching its readers how to know otherwise.Beginning Planetary Specters, I was familiar with how Indigenous climate change studies view climate change as a continuation of colonialism (Whyte 2017) and how different discourses of climate security depoliticize climate change, leading to border closures and viewing humanitarian victims as threats (MacDonald 2021). I also knew the-by now-paradigmatic suggestions that the Anthropocene is more aptly labelled the Capitaloscene, Plantainoscene or Eurocene (Moore 2015; Haraway 2015; Grove 2018). Lastly, I am conscious to be weary of any talk of resilience and adaptation -I have myself theorized the violence of climate change in a way "that pushes back against the idea that forced climate migration is a practical problem of adaptation and not a genocidal process" (du Plessis 2020:16). These are all attempts, we could say, of repoliticizing climate change. Planetary Specters builds on such insights, expands them, and introduces important new perspectives. First and foremost, what Ahuja powerfully adds to the equation is race and racial capitalism. Secondly, analyzing the politics of climate change from the vantage point of the figure of the climate migrant-coupled with keen attention to processes of racialization-is groundbreaking in how it turns political analysis of climate change on its head. And thirdly, Ahuja's detailed and focused empirical studies from Bangladesh and Syria, as well as South Asia and the Gulf more broadly, show informative examples of how the global politics and economies of climate change manifest locally in the Global South.Planetary Specters consists of four main chapters.The first explores how the icon of the climate migrant does not naturally follow from weather changes or ecological destruction. Rather, this imagery has been "invented" because it offers a discourse of migration that appeals to "a set of racialized presumptions about human conflict and population dynamics that fit into increasingly