Full Description
Empire and Environment argues that histories of imperialism, colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism are integral to understanding environmental violence in the transpacific region. The collection draws its rationale from the imbrication of imperialism and global environmental crisis, but its inspiration from the ecological work of activists, artists, and intellectuals across the transpacific region. Taking a postcolonial, ecocritical approach to confronting ecological ruin in an age of ecological crises and environmental catastrophes on a global scale, the collection demonstrates how Asian North American, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous Pacific Island cultural expressions critique a de-historicized sense of place, attachment, and belonging. In addition to its thirteen chapters from scholars who span the Pacific, each part of this volume begins with a poem by Craig Santos Perez. The volume also features a foreword by Macarena Gómez-Barris and an afterword by Priscilla Wald.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface: Out of the Ruins
Macarena Gómez-Barris
Introduction
Rina Garcia Chua, Heidi Hong, Jeffrey Santa Ana, Zhou Xiaojing
PART I: (Framing) Postcolonial Ecocritical Approaches to the Asia-Pacific
from Family Trees (poem) Craig Santos Perez
1 Transpacific Queer Ecologies: Confronting Ecological Ruination and
Imperialist Nostalgia in Han Ong's The Disinherited
Jeffrey Santa Ana
2 Cycas wadei and Enduring White Space
Kathleen Gutierrez
3 Rust and Recovery: A Study of South Indian Goddess Films
Chitra Sankaran
4 "If We Return We Will Learn:" Empire, Poetry, and Biocultural Knowledge
in Papua New Guinea
John Charles Ryan
PART II: Militarized Environments
Nuclear Family (poem) Craig Santos Perez
5 Environmental Violence and the Vietnam War in le thi diem thuy's
The Gangster We Are All Looking For
Emily Cheng
6 Toxic Waters: Vietnamese Ecologies in the Afterlives of Empire
Heidi Amin-Hong
7 Haunted by Empires: Micronesian Eco-Poetry Against Colonial Ruination
Zhou Xiaojing
PART III: Decolonizing the Transpacific: Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Resistance
Praise Song for Oceania (poem) Craig Santos Perez
8 Risk and Resistance at Po\\ōhakuloa
Rebecca Hogue
9 "Disentrancing" the Rot of Colonialism in Philippine and Canadian Ecopoetry
Rina Garcia Chua
10 Representing Postcolonial Water Environments in Contemporary Taiwanese
Literature
Tihan Chang
PART IV: Climate Justice and Ecological Futurities
Age of Plastic (poem), Craig Santos Perez
11 Climate Justice in the Transpacific Novel Amy Lee
12 Rising Like Waves: Drowning Settler Colonial Rhetoric with Aloha
Emalani Case
13 Imperial Debris, Vibrant Matter: Plastic in the Hands of Asian American and
Kanaka Maoli Artists
Chad Shomura
Afterword: "A New Way Beyond the Darkness"
Priscilla Wald
Contributors
Index
