Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins

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.

Chia-ju Chang is Associate Professor of Chinese at Brooklyn College-CUNY, USA. Her book Global Imagination of Ecological Communities: Chinese and Western Ecocritical Praxis (2013) won the 2013 Bureau of Jiangsu Province Journalism and Publication award in China. She also co-edited Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts (2016).