Questioning Borders - (Global Chinese Culture) by Robin Visser (Paperback)

About the Book

Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness.

Book Synopsis

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness.

Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls "Beijing Westerns" with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies.

By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.

Review Quotes

The vital contributions that Visser makes throughout this marvellous book, which unleashes some of the most creative planetary visions of Indigenous, Indigene and ethnic majority writers in China and Taiwan.-- "China Quarterly"

Makes significant contributions to the fields of Chinese, Taiwan, ecocritical, and ethnic studies by interrogating the formation and function of both lived and disciplinary borders.-- "Journal of Asian Studies"

At once a groundbreaking scholarly investigation and an affecting call to arms, Questioning Borders engages with questions of inter-imperiality, border ecology, and Indigenous ecoliterature, and does so rigorously and fearlessly.--Dorothee Xiaolong Hou "Chinese Literature and Thought Today"

Groundbreaking . . . Visser's breathtaking scope is both incredibly ambitious and highly effective. One of the most significant contributions of Questioning Borders is its systematic examination, for the first time in English-language scholarship, of authors writing about nature from less-studied ethnic groups in the field of modern Chinese literature.--Cheng Li "ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment"

Questioning Borders radically approaches contemporary literatures of the Chinese world via critical discourses of ecocriticism, global Indigenous studies, and decolonization theory. Incorporating diverse Han majority and ethnic minority writing, the volume charts the emergent Chinese cosmology of the present dynamic era and stimulates deep yet far-ranging conversations. An exciting book.--Mark Bender, editor of The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry

A comprehensive and illuminating comparison of Chinese and Indigenous literatures on the border ecologies of China and Taiwan. Questioning Borders sheds light on the power dynamics of China as a settler-colonialist regime in which Indigenous ecocriticism confronts the Chinese imperial geography of center and periphery, which underpins both China's development strategies and even the most radical Chinese ecoliteratures.--Uradyn E. Bulag, author of Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China's Mongolian Frontier

In this groundbreaking book, Robin Visser explores the shifting incarnations of the border as a territorial gateway, a contact zone, a liminal terrain, and an imaginary portal. She delves into the intersection of ethnic, cultural, political--and especially ecological--dynamics that inform cartographies and cosmologies of Sinophone states. A fantastic work.--David Der-wei Wang, author of Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China

This illuminating book offers deep insights into the tensions, interactions, and reciprocity among diverse ecologies, ethnicities, humans, and nonhumans. Robin Visser's brilliant analysis of ecoliterature by Han and Indigenous authors makes this book a must-read for students of environmental humanities.--Ban Wang, author of At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor, and Critical Ecology in Modern China

Visser's Questioning Borders provides a timely critical intervention that destabilizes the historically established borders and center-periphery relationship within the cultural and political imaginaries of the Hanspace. It offers rich textual studies on Indigenous ecoliteratures in China and Taiwan. A must-read for those interested in Chinese, Sinophone, global, and transnational Indigenous ecocriticism.--Chia-ju Chang, editor of Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins

About the Author

Robin Visser is professor and associate chair of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (2010).