Description
Book SynopsisEmbodied 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.
Trade ReviewThis is a superb book. In reconstructing the relationship between embodied memory and ecological consciousness in East Asian cultures, it also foregrounds the latest and exciting explorations of East Asian scholars in ecocriticism. With these contributions, this anthology will lead to a redrawing of the map of global ecological research.
-- Xiao-Hua Wang, Shenzhen University
Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing: New Ecological Perspectives from East Asia is an impressive collection of fifteen chapters. Collectively, it raises crucial questions concerning ‘land-human affinity’ and human responsibility in turbulent times of ecological crisis. Veering away from the notion of aesthetics as fetishized knowledge (e.g., Sino- and/or Cartesian ocularcentric aesthetics), this volume advocates for localized and embodied aesthetic responses as a basis for ethics, politics, and everyday cultural practices. It brings together a variety of disciplines—classical philosophy, critical animal/multispecies studies, green literary/cultural/ cinema studies, minority literary studies, and science and technology studies (STS) and Sci-Fi/Cli-fi—to cover a dazzling array of topics, including biotechnology, eco-displacement and endangered species, energy strategies, global capitalism and food industry, and land and cultural ruination, restoration, and preservation in East Asia. This book is a significant contribution to the field of East Asian ecocriticism!
-- Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College
Table of ContentsPart I: Living Wisdom & Lived Heritages
Chapter 1: Humility by Proportion: What Zhu Xi and St. Paul Have to Say about the Baconian Attack on ‘Nature’
Chapter 2: Old Dreams Retold: Lu Xun as Mytho-Ecological Writer
Chapter 3: Planetary Healing Through the Ecological Equilibrium of Ziran: A Daoist Therapy for the Anthropocene
Chapter 4: Toward an Ecocriticism of Cultural Diversity: Animism in the Novels of Guo Xuebo and Chi Zijian
Chapter 5: Population, Food, and Terraforming: Ethics in He Xi’s Alien Zone and Six
Realms of Existence
Chapter 6: Junkspace and Non-place in Taiwan’s New Eco-Literature
Part II: The Embodied Imaginary
Chapter 7: The Loss of Genetic Diversity and Embodied Memories in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl
Chapter 8: Porcine Texts in the Year of the Pig: Transgenic Matter on a Porcine Platter
Chapter 9: The Logic of the Glance: Non-Perspectival Literary Landscape in Wildfires by Ooka Shohei
Chapter 10: The Paradox of Aerial Documentaries: Eco-Gaze and National Vision
Chapter 11: Dolphins and Mermaids: The Endangerments and Multispecies Coexistence in Hong Kong and Stephen Chiau’s The Mermaid
Part III: Myriad Therapeutic Lands
Chapter 12: Displacement and Restoration: A Therapeutic Landscape in 311 Revival
Chapter 13: Nuclear Power Plants, East Asia, and Planetary Healing
Chapter 14: The Revitalization of Old Industrial Sites in Beijing: A Case Study of Shougang (Capital Steel) Park
Chapter 15: Rebuilding the Pavilion: ‘Doubled’ Experience of Heritage at the Geo-Media Age
