Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene: Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change

279 Pages·2019·4.141 MB·English

by  Kwai-Cheung Lo, Jessica Yeung

Chinese Shock
of the
Anthropocene
Image, Music and Text in
the Age of Climate Change
Edited by
Kwai-Cheung Lo
Jessica Yeung
Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene
Kwai-Cheung Lo • Jessica Yeung
Editors
Chinese Shock of the
Anthropocene
Image, Music and Text in the Age
of Climate Change
Editors
Kwai-Cheung Lo Jessica Yeung
Department of Humanities and Hong Kong Baptist University
Creative Writing Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
Hong Kong Baptist University
Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
ISBN 978-981-13-6684-0 ISBN 978-981-13-6685-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935191
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Cover credit: Xinjiang image by Enoch Cheung
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A
cknowledgements
This volume originates from a workshop on “Anthropocene and
Contemporary Chinese Cultures” that was held at Hong Kong Baptist
University in January 2018. Most of the contributors presented papers in
the workshop. In preparing this volume, we received support from various
people and organizations. We express our gratitude to Sara Crowley-
Vigneau of Palgrave Macmillan, who made this project possible. We
acknowledge the generous support of the Dean’s Office of the Faculty of
Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. The editing of these chapters also
benefited greatly from the copy-editing by Michael Luongo, technical
assistance of Chester Chan, editorial assistance of Connie Li, and assis-
tance with the references of Angel Jiang and the Tibetan names of Tsemdo.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Impoverishing Anthropocene with Chinese
Characteristics 1
Kwai-Cheung Lo
Part I Disposing and Recurring 19
2 The World Besieged by Waste: On Garbage, Recycling,
and Sublimation 21
Carlos Rojas
3 The Environment and Social Justice in Chinese
Documentaries: Crisis or Hope? 37
Jessica Yeung
4 Recognition, Reinhabitation, and Recreation: Engaging
Nature in Hong Kong Literature 57
Enoch Yee-Lok Tam
Part II Nonhuman and Mythic Spectres 81
5 The Eternal Return of Mythology: The White (Green)
Snake Legend in Maoist China and Colonial Hong Kong 83
Kenny Kwok-Kwan Ng
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 Magic Realism as a Critical Response to the Anthropocene 109
Wai-Ping Yau
7 Expansionist Ethnic Ecology: On Reading Jiang Rong’s
Wolf Totem 131
Howard Y. F. Choy
8 Too Inhuman to Die; Too Ethereal to Become a Ghost:
Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of
Ghosts 151
Victor Fan
Part III Ethnicity and Im-purity 177
9 The “Nature” of Ethnic Tensions: Under the Flaming
Mountains as Xinjiang’s First Novel 179
Laikwan Pang
10 “Original Ecology” Style of China’s Minority Performing
Arts: Examples from Uyghur Music 203
Chuen-Fung Wong
11 Animals, Ethnic Minorities, and Ecological Concerns in
Chinese Digital Cinema 225
Kwai-Cheung Lo
12 Pristine Tibet? The Anthropocene and Brand Tibet in
Chinese Cinema 249
Chris Berry
13 Conclusion 275
Jessica Yeung
Index 279
n c
otes on ontributors
Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. His
primary publications include China on Screen: Cinema and Nation
(2006, with Mary Farquhar); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China:
The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (2004); and
Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (2017, co-edited with Luke
Robinson). His “Pema Tseden and the Tibetan Road Movie: Space and
Identity Beyond the ‘Minority Nationality Film’” appeared in Journal of
Chinese Cinemas 10, no. 2 (2016).
Howard Y. F. Choy is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at Hong
Kong Baptist University, and is the author of Remapping the Past: Fictions
of History in Deng’s China, 1979–1997 (2008), and the assistant author of
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Confucianism (2005). He is also the editor
of Discourses of Disease: Writing Illness, the Mind and the Body in Modern
China (2016), and Selected Essays by Liu Zaifu (forthcoming).
Victor Fan is a senior lecturer at the Department of Film Studies,
King’s College London, and Film Consultant of Chinese Visual Festival.
Author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory
(2015) and Extraterritoriality: Politics in Hong Kong Cinema (forth-
coming in 2019), he has also published articles in journals including
World Picture Journal, Camera Obscura, Journal of Chinese Cinemas,
Screen, Film History, Comparative Literature and Culture, and other
edited volumes.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Kwai-Cheung Lo a professor in the Department of Humanities and
Creative Writing, and Director of Creative and Professional Writing
Program at Hong Kong Baptist University, is the author of Excess and
Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions (2010), and Chinese Face/Off:
The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong (2005), and the editor
of a Chinese-language anthology entitled Re-Sighting Asia: Deconstruction
and Reinvention in the Global Era (2014).
Kenny Kwok-Kwan Ng is an associate professor in the Academy of Film
at Hong Kong Baptist University, and is the author of The Lost Geopoetic
Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary
China (2015), and dozens of articles in journals and essay collections on
film adaptation, censorship and Chinese literature.
Laikwan Pang is a professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious
Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is the author of The
Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution
(2017), Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and
Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (2012), The Distorting Mirror: Visual
Modernity in China (2007), Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia:
Copyright, Piracy, and Cinema (2006), and Building a New China in
Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–37 (2002).
Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality,
and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University.
He is the author of Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National
Transformation in Modern China (2015), The Great Wall: A Cultural
History (2010), and The Naked Gaze: Reflection on Chinese Modernity
(2008). The books he edited include Writing Taiwan: A New Literary
History (2007, with David Der-wei Wang), Rethinking Chinese Popular
Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (2008, with Eileen Cheng-yin
Chow), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (2013, with Eileen
Cheng-yin Chow), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures
(2016, with Andrea Bachner), and Ghost Protocol: Development and
Displacement in Global China (2016, with Ralph Litzinger).
Enoch Yee-Lok Tam is a lecturer in the Academy of Film at Hong Kong
Baptist University. His recently presented papers include “Revisit Hong
Kong ‘Local’ Novels: Chan Koonchung, Wong Bik-wan and Hon Lai-chu
as Examples.” He is also the author of three novels in Chinese, translator
of academic books in film studies, and the editor of literary magazine
Fleurs des lettres and film website Cinezen.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Chuen-Fung  Wong is Associate Professor and Chair of Music at
Macalester College. He is a musicologist specialized in Uyghur and
Central Asian music, and the author of numerous articles about the mod-
ern performance of traditional Uyghur music in northwest China, particu-
larly in relation to the rising Chinese and Uyghur nationalisms in the
twentieth century and beyond.
Wai-Ping Yau is Associate Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist
University. Yau has published numerous articles on Hong Kong and
Chinese film and literature, including works by Stanley Kwan, Wong Kar-
wai, Pema Tseden and Tashi Dawa. He is also a translator of literary works
by writers including Hong Kong’s Dung Kai-cheung.
Jessica Yeung Associate Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist
University, is author of Ink Dances in Limbo: Gao Xingjian’s Writings as
Cultural Translation (2008) and The Anarchist Theatre of the Hong Kong
Dramatist Augustine Mok (2019, in Chinese).