DeepSummary
In this podcast episode, Robin Visser discusses her new book 'Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan' with the host. The book explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing their representations of relationships between humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery, which she calls 'Beijing Westerns,' with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies.
Visser shares insights from her extensive field research in regions like Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, where she interviewed local scholars, writers, and environmental activists. She discusses how writers from different ethnic groups, such as Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese, represent their unique ecological knowledge and perspectives.
Through examples from various chapters, Visser highlights the differences and similarities in how Han and non-Han writers approach themes like mobility, dark humor, shamanism, and the decolonization of thinking about indigeneity. She aims to center Indigenous cosmologies and inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Visser's book 'Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan' aims to center Indigenous cosmologies and challenge dominant Han Chinese perspectives on the environment and human-nature relationships.
- The book contrasts the 'Beijing Westerns' approach, which exoticizes and appropriates Indigenous ecological knowledge, with diverse Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world found in ecoliterature.
- Through extensive field research and literary analysis, Visser explores how writers from various ethnic groups in China and Taiwan, including Han Chinese, represent their unique ecological knowledge and challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies.
- Visser highlights the use of dark humor, shamanism, mobility motifs, and anti-epic forms in ecoliterature to critique colonial epistemes and inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing.
- The book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies, while acknowledging the author's own ongoing journey to decolonize her thinking.
- Visser hopes to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene by centering Indigenous cosmologies and their relational ways of being with the world.
- The book covers ecoliterature from diverse regions, including Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, which are sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts.
- Visser's analysis spans various genres, including novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, by writers from ethnic groups such as Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “I sense the border, and sensing is something that invades your emotions and your body responds to it, dictating to the mind what the mind must start thinking, changing its direction, shifting the geography of reasoning.“ by Robin Visser
- “After reading Wolf Totem, he realized the Mongols had become viagra for the Chinese, which is just an astonishing quote, but kind of encapsulates the sentiments.“ by Robin Visser
- “I've unwittingly absorbed chinese and western imperialist cosmologies. And it's really only been recently that I've or a very slow process about trying to decolonize my relational practices, and I'm still very much in process on that.“ by Robin Visser
- “So basically, I think what he. A lot of his work features animals and kind of zoomorphism, where he does very interesting things where, you know, for example, he's buddhist, so he shows a lot of buddhist taboos against practices that ravage ecosystems.“ by Robin Visser
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Episode Information
New Books in Environmental Studies
Marshall Poe
4/18/24