Description
Book SynopsisMigrant Ecologies investigates the ways in which Zheng Xiaoqiong's poetry exposes the entanglements of migrant ecologies embedded within local and global networks of capital and labor. The author contends that women migrant workers in particular, as portrayed in Zheng's poems, are the visible manifestation of the interconnections between the so-called factories of the world and slum villages-in-the-city, between urban development and rural decline, and between the local environmental degradation and the global market. By adopting an ecological approach to Zheng's poems about women migrant workers in China, the author explores what Donna Haraway calls webbed ecologies (49). The concept of ecologies serves to enhance not only the layered, complex interconnections underlying women migrant workers' plight and environmental degradation in China, but also the emergence and transformation of migrant spaces, subjects, activism, and networks resulting in part from globalization.
Trade ReviewIn Migrant Ecologies, Zhou Xiaojing articulates the hidden intricacies and intimacies of gendered labor, mass migration, ecological devastation, rural decline, and worker resistance in China through her brilliant analysis and translations of Zheng Xioaquion’s poetry. This book makes an invaluable contribution to global ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and migration studies. -- Craig Santos Perez, associate professor, University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa
Table of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Migrant Ecologies as a Site of Critical Inquiry
Chapter 1: Vignettes of Material Memoirs: Toxic Environment and Women Migrant Workers’ Industrial Diseases
Chapter 2: “Carceral Capitalism”: Factory Cities and Villages-in-the-City
Chapter 3: The Other Scene of Globalization: Hollow Villages and Migrant Workers’ Families
Conclusion: A Politics of Migrant Ecologies
Bibliography
Index
About the Author and Translator
