Chinese Women Writers On The Environment

The stories, prose and poems in this anthology offer readers a unique and generous array of women's experiences in China. In a world that is rapidly modernizing, these writings attempt to reconcile with the ever-changing people, plants, beasts and environment. After five years of painstaking collection and translation, the authors present these stories of strength and sadness, defiance and resilience, urban and village life, from the days of the cultural revolution to the present. Whether a house full of hawks and eagles, a stubborn cow, or a defiant elderly couple sabotaging a lumber operation, these stories express powerful visions of the earth interwoven with human memory.

The first book in English on women’s history in twentieth-century Manchuria, Resisting Manchukuo adds to a growing literature that challenges traditional understandings of Japanese colonialism. Norman Smith reveals the literary world of Japanese-occupied Manchuria (Manchukuo, 1932-45) and examines the lives, careers, and literary legacies of seven prolific Chinese women writers during the period. He shows how a complex blend of fear and freedom produced an environment in which Chinese women writers could articulate dissatisfaction with the overtly patriarchal and imperialist nature of the Japanese cultural agenda while working in close association with colonial institutions.

This Handbook addresses how Chinese cities govern environmental changes generated by fast economic growth and urbanisation. With in-depth case studies on governing waste management, climate change, and energy transition, it will illuminate the relationship between the state, market, and society in environmental governance.

This book works equally well in the following multiple fields: Gender Studies, Literary/Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, Asian and Pacific Studies, Chinese Studies, Critical Theory and Literary Historiography

The essays in this volume consider the state of current writing of the world's best Chinese women writers. All the contributors relate their authors to the life and work of other contemporary Chinese women writers, and compare work coming from PRC, Taiwan and overseas Chinese. The essays make a contribution to the fields of Modern Chinese literature and women's studies, and although they are primarily intended to bear witness to the quality of women's writing, they also attempt to elucidate the complex issues of Chinese women's lives in the contemporary world.

What does it mean to read from elsewhere? Women Writers in Postsocialist China introduces readers to a range and variety of contemporary Chinese women’s writing, which has seen phenomenal growth in recent years. The book addresses the different ways women’s issues are understood in China and the West, attending to the processes of translation, adaptation, and the grafting of new ideas with existing Chinese understandings of gender, feminism, subjectivity, consumerism and (post) modernism. By focusing on women’s autobiographical, biographical, fictional and historical writing, the book engages in a transcultural flow of ideas between western and indigenous Chinese feminisms. Taking account of the accretions of social, cultural, geographic, literary, economic, and political movements and trends, cultural formations and ways of thinking, it asks how the texts and the concepts they negotiate might be understood in the social and cultural spaces within China and how they might be interpreted differently elsewhere in the global locations in which they circulate. The book argues that women-centred writing in China has a direct bearing on global feminist theory and practice. This critical study of selected genres and writers highlights the shifts in feminist perspectives within contemporary local and global cultural landscapes.

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. 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. Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls “Beijing Westerns” with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies. By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.

Chinese Environmental Humanities showcases contemporary ecocritical approaches to Chinese culture and aesthetic production as practiced in China itself and beyond. As the first collaborative environmental humanities project of this kind, this book brings together sixteen scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, philosophy, ecocinema and ecomedia studies, religious studies, minority studies, and animal or multispecies studies. The fourteen chapters are conceptually framed through the lens of the Chinese term huanjing (environment or “encircling the surroundings”), a critical device for imagining the aesthetics and politics of place-making, or “the practice of environing at the margin.” The discourse of environing at the margins facilitates consideration of the modes, aesthetics, ethics, and politics of environmental inclusion and exclusion, providing a lens into the environmental thinking and practices of the world’s most populous society.