Download or read book East Asian Ecocriticisms written by S. Estok and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: East Asian Ecocriticisms presents original essays from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China that define and characterize trends in East Asian ecocriticism. Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives in environmental thought and scholarship, this volume presents valuable and original contributions to global conversations.

Download or read book Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures Histories Myths and Societies written by Chi P. Pham and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocriticism in relation to the Southeast Asian region is relatively new. So far, John Charles Ryan’s Ecocriticism in Southeast Asia is the first book of its kind to focus on the region and its literature to give an ecocritical analysis: that volume compiles analyses of the eco-literatures from most of the Southeast Asian region, providing a broad insight into the ecological concerns of the region as depicted in its literatures and other cultural texts. This edited volume furthers the study of Southeast Asian ecocriticism, focusing specifically on prominent myths and histories and the myriad ways in which they connect to the social fabric of the region. Our book is an original contribution to the expanding field of ecocriticism, as it highlights the mytho-historical basis of many of the region’s literatures and their relationship to the environment. The varied articles in this volume together explore the idea of nature and its relationship with humans. The always problematic questions that surround such explorations, such as “why do we regard nature as ‘external’?” or “how is humankind a continuum with nature?”, emerge throughout the volume either overtly or implicitly. As Pepper (1993) points out, what Karl Marx referenced as ‘first’ or ‘external’ nature gave rise to humankind. But humanity “worked on this ‘first’ nature to produce a ‘second’ nature: the material creations of society plus its institutions, ideas and values.” (Pepper, 108). Thus, our volume constantly negotiates this field of ideas and belief systems, in diverse ways and in various cultures, attempting to relate them to the current ecological predicaments of ASEAN. It will likely prove an invaluable resource for scholars and students of ecocriticism and, more broadly, of Southeast Asian cultures and literatures.

Download or read book Southeast Asian Ecocriticism written by John Charles Ryan and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-11-08 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southeast Asian Ecocriticism presents a timely exploration of the rapidly expanding field of ecocriticism through its devotion to the writers, creators, theorists, traditions, concerns, and landscapes of Southeast Asian countries. While ecocritics have begun to turn their attention to East and South Asian contexts and, particularly, to Chinese and Indian cultural productions, less emphasis has been placed on the diverse environmental traditions of Southeast Asia. Building on recent scholarship in Asian ecocriticism, the book gives prominence to the range of theoretical models and practical approaches employed by scholars based within, and located outside of, the Southeast region. Consisting of twelve chapters, Southeast Asian Ecocriticism includes contributions on the ecological prose, poetry, cinema, and music of Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. The authors emphasize the transnational exchanges of materials, technologies, texts, motifs, and ideas between Southeast Asian countries and Australia, England, Taiwan (Formosa), and the United States. From environmental hermeneutics, postcolonial studies, indigenous studies, and ecofeminism to critical plant studies, ecopoetics, and ecopedagogy, the edited collection embodies the dynamic breadth of interdisciplinary environmental scholarship today. Southeast Asian Ecocriticism foregrounds the theories, practices, and prospects of ecocriticism in the region. The volume opens up new directions and reveals fresh possibilities not only for ecocritical scholarship in Southeast Asia but for a comparative environmental criticism that transcends political boundaries and national canons. The volume highlights the important role of literature in heightening awareness of ecological issues at local, regional, and global scales.

Download or read book Ecoambiguity written by Karen Thornber and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-03-02 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: East Asian literatures are famous for celebrating the beauties of nature and depicting people as intimately connected with the natural world. But in fact, because the region has a long history of transforming and exploiting nature, much of the fiction and poetry in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages portrays people as damaging everything from small woodlands to the entire planet. These texts seldom talk about environmental crises straightforwardly. Instead, like much creative writing on degraded ecosystems, they highlight what Karen Laura Thornber calls ecoambiguity—the complex, contradictory interactions between people and the nonhuman environment. Ecoambiguity is the first book in any language to analyze Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary treatments of damaged ecosystems. Thornber closely examines East Asian creative portrayals of inconsistent human attitudes, behaviors, and information concerning the environment and takes up texts by East Asians who have been translated and celebrated around the world, including Gao Xingjian, Ishimure Michiko, Jiang Rong, and Ko Un, as well as fiction and poetry by authors little known even in their homelands. Ecoambiguity addresses such environmental crises as deforesting, damming, pollution, overpopulation, species eradication, climate change, and nuclear apocalypse. This book opens new portals of inquiry in both East Asian literatures and ecocriticism (literature and environment studies), as well as in comparative and world literature.

Download or read book Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature written by Riccardo Moratto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on ecocritical aspects throughout Chinese literature, particularly modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the contributors to this book examine the environmental and ecological dimensions of notions such as qing (情) and jing (境). Chinese modern and contemporary environmental writing offers a unique aesthetic perspective toward the natural world. Such a perspective is mainly ecological and allows human subjects to take a benign and nonutilitarian attitude toward nature. The contributors to this book demonstrate how Chinese literary ecology tends toward an ecological-systemic holism from which all human behaviors should be closely examined. They do so by examining a range of writers and genres, including Liu Cixin’s science fiction, Wu Ming-yi’s environmental fiction, and Zhang Chengzhi’s historical narratives. This book provides valuable insights for scholars and students looking to understand how Chinese literature conceptualizes the relationship between humanity and nature, as well as our role and position within the natural realm.

Download or read book East Asian Ecocriticisms written by S. Estok and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: East Asian Ecocriticisms presents original essays from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China that define and characterize trends in East Asian ecocriticism. Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives in environmental thought and scholarship, this volume presents valuable and original contributions to global conversations.

Download or read book Embodied Memories Embedded Healing written by Xinmin Liu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-28 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing critically engages with the major East Asian cultural knowledge, beliefs, and practices that influence environmental consciousness in the twenty-first century. This volume examines key thinkers and aspects of Daoist, Confucianist, Buddhist, indigenous, animistic, and neo-Confucianist thought. With a particular focus on animistic perspectives on environmental healing and environmental consciousness, the contributors also engage with media studies (eco-cinema), food studies, critical animal studies, biotechnology, and the material sciences.

Download or read book Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature written by Begoña Simal-González and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-24 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature: Gold Mountains, Weedflowers, and Murky Globes offers an ecocritical reinterpretation of Asian American literature. The book considers more than a century of Asian American writing, from Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) to Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), through an ecocritical lens. The volume explores the most relevant landmarks in Asian American literature: the first-contact narratives written by Bulosan, Kingston, Mukherjee, and Jen; the controversial texts published by Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) at the time of the Yellow Peril; the rise of cultural nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s, illustrated by Wong’s Homebase and Kingston’s China Men; old and recent examples of “internment literature” dealing with the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII (Sone, Houston, Miyake, Kadohata); and the new trends in Asian American literature since the 1990s, exemplified by Yamashita’s and Ozeki’s novels, which explore the challenges of our transnational, transnatural era. Begoña Simal-González’s ecocritical readings of these texts provide crucial interdisciplinary insights, addressing and analyzing important narratives within Asian American culture and literature.

Download or read book Mushroom Clouds written by Simon C. Estok and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-28 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mushroom Clouds: Ecocritical Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia examines the growing significance of the eco-implications of the increasing militarism of East Asia. As a transcultural image and metaphor, mushroom clouds signify anthropogenic violence and destruction, as exemplified by wars and nuclear bombings. Immediately evoking memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mushroom clouds metaphor has deep roots and implications in East Asia, and this volume explores these roots and implications from the perspectives of a variety of scholars and artists from different parts of East Asia. The chapters that comprise Mushroom Clouds respond to the increasingly dangerous developments in the world that led up to and have occurred since the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, developments that threaten the stability of the region and the world. In the wake of the 70th anniversary of the division of Korea, increasing attention has been focused on the legacy of the Cold War, on the one hand, and on the continuing militarization of East Asia, on the other. After the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the truce across the 38th parallel, after the shelling of Kinmen and Matsu, East Asia became (and remains) one of the most densely militarized regions in the world. Under the shadow of war, however, the concern about environmental impacts has been growing, not only in social discourse but also in literature and the visual arts. The first of its kind, Mushroom Clouds gathers ecocritics from East Asia to examine issues such as militarization, militarized islands, military tourism, military villages, post-war environments, nuclear accidents, and the demilitarized sone (DMZ) wildlife, among others, in East Asia.

Download or read book Ecocriticism in Taiwan written by Chia-ju Chang and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocriticism is a mode of interdisciplinary critical inquiry into the relationship between cultural production, society, and the environment. The field advocates for the more-than-human realm as well as for underprivileged human and non-human groups and their perspectives. Taiwan is one of the earliest centers for promoting ecocriticism outside the West and has continued to play a central role in shaping ecocriticism in East Asia. This is the first English anthology dedicated to the vibrant development of ecocriticism in Taiwan. It provides a window to Taiwan’s important contributions to international ecocriticism, especially an emerging “vernacular” trend in the field emphasizing the significance of local perspectives and styles, including non-western vocabularies, aesthetics, cosmologies, and political ideologies. Taiwan's unique history, geographic location, geology, and subtropical climate generate locale-specific, vernacular thinking about island ecology and environmental history, as well as global environmental issues such as climate change, dioxin pollution, species extinction, energy decisions, pollution, and environmental injustice. In hindsight, Taiwan's industrial modernization no longer appears as a success narrative among Asia's “Four Little Dragons,” but as a cautionary tale revealing the brute force entrepreneurial exploitation of the land and the people. In this light, this volume can be seen as a critical response to Taiwan's postcolonial, capitalist-industrial modernity, as manifested in the scholars’ readings of Taiwan's "mountain and river," ocean, animal, and aboriginal (non)fictional narratives, environmental documentaries, and art installations. This volume is endowed with a mixture of ecocosmopolitan and indigenous sensitivities. Though dominated by the Han Chinese ethnic group and its Confucian ideology, Taiwan is a place of complicated ethnic identities and affiliations. The succession of changing colonial and political regimes, made even more complex by the island’s sixteen aboriginal groups and several diasporic subcultures (South Asian immigrants, Western expatriates, and diverse immigrants from the Chinese mainland), has led to an ongoing quest for political and cultural identity. This complexity urges Taiwan-based ecoscholars to pay attention to the diasporic, comparative, and intercultural dimensions of local specificity, either based on their own diasporic experience or the cosmopolitan features of the Taiwanese texts they scrutinize. This cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is a key contribution Taiwan has to offer current ecocritical scholarship.

Download or read book Ecocriticism in Japan written by Hisaaki Wake and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocriticism in Japan provides an answer to the question, “What can ecocriticism do when engaging with Japanese literature and culture?” Engaging works ranging from The Tale of Genji to Abe, Ōe, Ishimure, and Miyazaki, this volume examines works Japanese people and culture in terms of nature and environment.

Download or read book Women Subalterns and Ecologies in South and Southeast Asian Women s Fiction written by Chitra Sankaran and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, East Asia has gained prominence and has become synonymous with Asia, while other Asian regions, such as South and Southeast Asia, have been subsumed under it. The resultant overgeneralization has meant that significant aspects of the global ecological crisis as they affect these two regions have been overlooked. Chitra Sankaran refocuses the global lens on these two rapidly developing regions of Asia. Combining South Asian and Southeast Asian philosophical views and folk perspectives with mainstream ecocritical and ecofeminist theories, she generates a localized critical idiom that qualifies and subverts some established theoretical assumptions. This pioneering study, introducing a corpus of more than thirty ecofictions by women writers from twelve countries in South and Southeast Asia, examines how recent global threats to ecosystems, in both nature and culture, impact subdominant groups, including women. This new corpus reveals how women and subalterns engage with various aspects of critical ecologies. Using ecofeminist theory augmented by postcolonial and risk theories as the main theoretical framework, Sankaran argues that these women writers present unique perspectives that review Asian women’s relationships to human and nonhuman worlds.

Download or read book Transactions with the World written by Adam O’Brien and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their bold experimentation and bracing engagement with culture and politics, the “New Hollywood” films of the late 1960s and early 1970s are justly celebrated contributions to American cinematic history. Relatively unexplored, however, has been the profound environmental sensibility that characterized movies such as The Wild Bunch, Chinatown, and Nashville. This brisk and engaging study explores how many hallmarks of New Hollywood filmmaking, such as the increased reliance on location shooting and the rejection of American self-mythologizing, made the era such a vividly “grounded” cinematic moment. Synthesizing a range of narrative, aesthetic, and ecocritical theories, it offers a genuinely fresh perspective on one of the most studied periods in film history.

Download or read book Greening East Asia written by Ashley Esarey and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: East Asia hosts a fifth of the world’s population and consumes over half the world’s coal, a quarter of its petroleum products, and a tenth of its natural gas. It also produces a third of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, making it a major contributor to climate change. The region—whose countries share ecological, sociocultural, and political characteristics while varying in size, resource wealth, history, and political systems—offers excellent insights into the complex dynamics influencing environmental politics, advocacy, and policy. With essays addressing Japan after Fukushima, coal plants and wind turbines in China, environmental activism in Taiwan, and sustainable rural development in South Korea, Greening East Asia explores a region’s shift from development to “eco-development” in acknowledgment that environmental sustainability is a critical component of economic growth.

Download or read book Eco Art History in East and Southeast Asia written by De-nin D. Lee and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this anthology examine artwork and sites in East and Southeast Asia through the lens of eco–art history. In these regions, significant anthropogenic changes to terrain, watercourses, and ecosystems date back millennia, as do artwork and artefacts that both conceptualize and modify the natural world. The rising interest in earth-conscious modes of analysis, or “eco–art history,” informs this anthology, which explores the mutual impact of artistic expressions and local environments in East and Southeast Asia. Moreover, conceptual tools and case studies focused on these regions impart important insights bearing on the development of eco–art history. The book includes case studies examining the impact of the Little Ice Age on court painting and systems of representing marine life in the Joseon period in Korea. Other contributors consider contemporary artistic strategies, such as developing a “sustainability aesthetics” and focusing attention to non-human agents, to respond to environmental damage and climate change in the present. Additional essays analyse the complicated art historical ecology of heritage sites and question the underlying anthropocentrism in art historical priorities and practices. As a whole, this anthology argues for the importance of ecological considerations in art history.

Download or read book Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco Literatures written by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this anthology of contemporary eco-literature, the editors have gathered an ensemble of a hundred emerging, mid-career, and established Indigenous writers from Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the global Pacific diaspora. This book itself is an ecological form with rhizomatic roots and blossoming branches. Within these pages, the reader will encounter a wild garden of genres, including poetry, chant, short fiction, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, visual texts, and even a dramatic play—all written in multilingual offerings of English, Pacific languages, pidgin, and translation. Seven main themes emerge: “Creation Stories and Genealogies,” “Ocean and Waterscapes,” “Land and Islands,” “Flowers, Plants, and Trees,” “Animals and More-than-Human Species,” “Climate Change,” and “Environmental Justice.” This aesthetic diversity embodies the beautiful bio-diversity of the Pacific itself. The urgent voices in this book call us to attention—to action!—at a time of great need. Pacific ecologies and the lives of Pacific Islanders are currently under existential threat due to the legacy of environmental imperialism and the ongoing impacts of climate change. While Pacific writers celebrate the beauty and cultural symbolism of the ocean, islands, trees, and flowers, they also bravely address the frightening realities of rising sea levels, animal extinction, nuclear radiation, military contamination, and pandemics. Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures reminds us that we are not alone; we are always in relation and always ecological. Humans, other species, and nature are interrelated; land and water are central concepts of identity and genealogy; and Earth is the sacred source of all life, and thus should be treated with love and care. With this book as a trusted companion, we are inspired and empowered to reconnect with the world as we navigate towards a precarious yet hopeful future.

Download or read book Ecoambiguity Community and Development written by Scott Slovic and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-02-19 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development takes stock of cultural and environmental contexts in many different regions of the world by exploring literature and film. Artists and scholars working in the social ecology, environmental justice, and postcolonial arenas have long recognized that as soon as we tug on a thread of “ecodegradation,” we generally find it linked to some form of cultural oppression. The reverse is also often true. In the spirit of postcolonial ecocriticism, the studies collected by Scott Slovic, R. Swarnalatha, and Vidya Sarveswaran emphasize the impossibility of disentangling environmental and cultural problems. While not all the authors explicitly invoke Karen Thornber’s term “ecoambiguity” or the concepts and terminology of postcolonial ecocriticism, their articles frequently bring to light various ironies. For example, the fact that Ukrainian environmental experience in the twenty-first century is defined by one of the world’s most infamous industrial disasters, the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, yet Ukrainian culture, like many throughout the world, actually cherishes a profound, even animistic, attachment to the wonders of nature. The repetition of this and other paradoxes in human cultural responses to the more-than-human world reinforces our sense of the congruities and idiosyncrasies of human culture. Every human culture, regardless of its condition of economic and industrial development, has produced its own version of “environmental literature and art”—but the nuances of this work reflect that culture’s precise social and geophysical circumstances. In various ways, these stories of community and development from across the planet converge and diverge, as told and explained by distinguished scholars, many of whom come from the cultures represented in these articles.