Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan

Robin Visser

Published by Columbia University Press 2023

Questioning Borders

Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan

Robin Visser

In the series Global Chinese Culture

https://doi.org/10.7312/viss19980

Overview
Contents

About this book

Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness.

Author / Editor information

Robin Visser is professor and associate chair of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (2010).

Reviews

Mark Bender, editor of The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry:
Questioning Borders radically approaches contemporary literatures of the Chinese world via critical discourses of ecocriticism, global Indigenous studies, and decolonization theory. Incorporating diverse Han majority and ethnic minority writing, the volume charts the emergent Chinese cosmology of the present dynamic era and stimulates deep yet far-ranging conversations. An exciting book.

Chia-ju Chang, editor of Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins:
Visser’s Questioning Borders provides a timely critical intervention that destabilizes the historically established borders and center-periphery relationship within the cultural and political imaginaries of the Hanspace. It offers rich textual studies on Indigenous ecoliteratures in China and Taiwan. A must-read for those interested in Chinese, Sinophone, global, and transnational Indigenous ecocriticism.

Ban Wang, author of At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor, and Critical Ecology in Modern China:
This illuminating book offers deep insights into the tensions, interactions, and reciprocity among diverse ecologies, ethnicities, humans, and nonhumans. Robin Visser’s brilliant analysis of ecoliterature by Han and Indigenous authors makes this book a must-read for students of environmental humanities.

Uradyn E. Bulag, author of Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China’s Mongolian Frontier:
A comprehensive and illuminating comparison of Chinese and Indigenous literatures on the border ecologies of China and Taiwan. Questioning Borders sheds light on the power dynamics of China as a settler-colonialist regime in which Indigenous ecocriticism confronts the Chinese imperial geography of center and periphery, which underpins both China’s development strategies and even the most radical Chinese ecoliteratures.

David Der-wei Wang, author of Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China:
In this groundbreaking book, Robin Visser explores the shifting incarnations of the border as a territorial gateway, a contact zone, a liminal terrain, and an imaginary portal. She delves into the intersection of ethnic, cultural, political—and especially ecological—dynamics that inform cartographies and cosmologies of Sinophone states. A fantastic work.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: Ecoliteratures Inhabiting Borders Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER ONE Beijing Westerns and Hanspace Elixirs in Southwest China Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	34
CHAPTER TWO Grassland Logic and Desert Carbon Imaginaries in Inner Mongolia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
CHAPTER THREE Sacred Routes and Dark Humor in Grounded Xinjiang Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
CHAPTER FOUR Cosmic Ecologies and Transcendent Tricksters on the Tibetan Plateau Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
CHAPTER FIVE Island Excursions and Indigenous Waterways in Activist Taiwan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Epilogue: Indigenous Entanglements in Techno Hypersubjectivity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	287
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	313

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 31

eBook

Published: August 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780231553292