Full Description
This book offers a fresh and timely exploration of the intersections between ecology, media, and culture in Asian contexts, with particular attention to audiovisual narratives. Moving beyond conventional approaches to Asian media that privilege aesthetic, cultural, or socio-political analyses, it foregrounds ecological narratives and environmental themes embedded in the region's media practices. Drawing on a wide range of regional examples, the volume examines how Asian media creators engage with complex questions of history, globalisation, power, and environmental crisis while articulating distinctive counter-narratives that challenge Western-centric frameworks and orientalist perspectives. Spanning a broad geographical and thematic scope, including Japan, Korea, Thailand, Iran, Vietnam, China, and India, the book offers nuanced insights into both the ecological challenges faced across the region and the cultural frameworks that shape their mediation and representation. By combining theoretical interventions with in-depth case studies, the volume makes a rigorous scholarly contribution while providing a grounded analytical mapping of contemporary Asian ecomedia. Its key contributions lie in its interdisciplinary approach, which brings together ecocinema studies, environmental humanities, and postcolonial theory, centring Asian epistemologies and perspectives, as well as in its rich corpus of case studies drawn from varied cultural and historical contexts. As such, this volume constitutes an essential resource for readers seeking a critical and comprehensive understanding of ecological issues and their complex representations in Asian media and culture. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students in media studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and Asian studies.
Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Akira: Terra nullius before and after History.- Chapter 3. Nature and Caste in Telugu Cinema- An Ecocritical Reading.- Chapter 4. Demythologising Nature: Snow Leopard as Ecomedia.- Chapter 5. An audio-visual portrait of Vietnamese Ecofeminism in Nguyễn-Võ Nghiêm-Minh's film, 2030.- Chapter 6. (Un)Breathing the Air: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Literary and Visual Narratives of Air in Selected Sinophone Urban Texts.- Chapter 7. Wielding and Caring for the Weather: Individual Agency and Reactionary Care in Makoto Shinkai's Tenki no Ko.- Chapter 8. Thanato-ecocinema: Representations of Nature and Death in Takahata and Miyazaki's works.- Chapter 9. Iranian cinema's geopoetics.- Chapter 10. Haptic Landscapes, Sick Bodies, and Ecological Sensibility in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cinema.- Chapter 11. Eco dystopian Narratives in Contemporary Asian Video Games: Nier: Automata.- Chapter 12. Disaster, Redemption, and Ecofeminist Renewal: Post-Catastrophic Narratives in Japanese Cinema.- Chapter 13. Escaping to Nature, Running from Earth: The Diverging Ecologies in K-Dramas.
