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This volume illustrates Asian speculative fiction's potential to interrogate and inspire humanity's ecological and ethical responsibilities, seeking to fill a major lacuna in previous academic literature around ecocriticism in speculative fiction. Contributions are thematically organized into three sections Human-Nature Co-evolution and Ecomedia, Technologies and East Asian Heritage, and Posthuman Ecology. Chapter authors draw on global viewpoints to provide a multi-dimensional analysis that includes Indigenous knowledge, trans-local (inter-Asian) exchanges, and perspectives from the Global South. To end, the book provides a reflection on how speculative fiction promotes a vision of interconnected kinship among humans, the nonhuman, and the natural world.
List of contents
Introduction.-Part One.-Human-Nature Coevolution and Ecomedia.-1. -Biodiversity Restoration and Coevolution in Shuang Chimu s My Family and Other Evolving Animals .-2-. Experiential Seeing .-Embodied Encounters in Speculative Fiction in China and East Asia.-3.- It s also of our Pig-Basket Grass clan .- The Prospect of Kin-Making in Kuei-hsing Chang s Monkey Cup.-Part Two.-Technologies and the East Asian Heritages.-4. -The Cold Eyes of Karma.-Myth and Rationality in Chinese Science Fiction.-5.-Labor Ecologies and Roboticization in the Fiction of Hiroko Oyamada and Pabsi Livmar.-6.- Cyborg Lovers in Chinese Science Fiction.-7.- Posthuman Sexualities in in Natsuko Mori s Pet Boy and Unmoral Contraption .-Part Three.- Posthuman Ecology.-8. -Sinking into Posthuman Inhumanity and Death.-Warnings from Chinese Science Fiction.-9.- Fourth Space.- Kin-Making against Capitalist Modernity in Post-Socialist China.-10. - Making Kin and Imhumanism in Chinese Science Fiction on Chen Qiufan s The Post Human Age (2018).-11. -Korean Kinship Traditions and the Global Anthropocene.- Woori-ism in Choyeop Kim sThe Greenhouse at the End of the Earth.
About the author
Xinmin Liu
is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Cultures in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race at Washington State University, USA. His previous book publications include
Signposts of Self-Realization: Evolution, Ethics and Sociality in Modern Chinese Literature and Film
(2004) and
Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing: New Ecological Perspectives from East Asia
(2021, co-edited with Peter I-min Huang).
Hua Li
is Professor of Chinese at Montana State University, USA. Her previous book publications include
Chinese Science Fiction During the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw
(2021),
Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua: Coming of Age in Troubled Times
(2011), and
Chinese Science Fiction: Concepts, Forms, and Histories
(2024, co-edited with Mingwei Song and Nathaniel Isaacson).
Summary
This volume illustrates Asian speculative fiction's potential to interrogate and inspire humanity's ecological and ethical responsibilities, seeking to fill a major lacuna in previous academic literature around ecocriticism in speculative fiction. Contributions are thematically organized into three sections—Human-Nature Co-evolution and Ecomedia, Technologies and East Asian Heritage, and Posthuman Ecology. Chapter authors draw on global viewpoints to provide a multi-dimensional analysis that includes Indigenous knowledge, trans-local (inter-Asian) exchanges, and perspectives from the Global South. To end, the book provides a reflection on how speculative fiction promotes a vision of interconnected kinship among humans, the nonhuman, and the natural world.
