Full Description
This book examines China's role and its cultural productions in the process of environmental destruction and transformation, focusing on how various cultural media play a significant role in shaping and reproducing Chinese subject formation in relation to changing ecological conditions. It argues that China under the leadership of Xi Jinping vowed in 2017 to play a leading role in preserving the planet for the future, but many of its actions such as its "Belt and Road" initiative have aroused apprehension rather than inspired confidence. Against this backdrop of environmental concern, this volume brings together a cutting-edge critical analysis of Chinese literature, music and cinema, offering a transdisciplinary and comprehensive vision of Chinese arts and literature under the current conditions of the Anthropocene. This volume sets a high scholarly standard in the field, and constitutes a valuable reference for scholars and students of Chinese cultural studies, Chinese studies and Anthropocene studies.
Contents
1. Introduction: Impoverishing Anthropocene with Chinese Characteristics.- Part I Disposing and Recurring.- 2. The World Besieged by Waste: On Garbage, Recycling, and Sublimation.- 3. The Environment and Social Justice in Chinese Documentaries: Crisis or Hope?.- 4. Recognition, Reinhabitation, and Recreation: Engaging Nature in Hong Kong Literature.- Part II Nonhuman and Mythic Spectres.- 5. The Eternal Return of Mythology: The White (Green) Snake Legend in Maoist China and Colonial Hong Kong.- 6. Magic Realism as a Critical Response to the Anthropocene.- 7. Expansionist Ethnic Ecology: On Reading Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem.- 8. Too Inhuman to Die; Too Ethereal to Become a Ghost: Children are Not Afraid of Death, Children are Afraid of Ghosts.- Part III Ethnicity and Im-Purity.- 9. The "Nature" of Ethnic Tensions: Under the Flaming Mountains as Xinjiang's First Novel.- 10. "Original Ecology" Style of China's Minority Performing Arts: Examples from Uyghur Music.- 11. Animals, Ethnic Minorities, and Ecological Concerns in Chinese Digital Cinema.- 12. Pristine Tibet? The Anthropocene and Brand Tibet in Chinese Cinema.- 13. Conclusion.
