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Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film

East Asian EcocinemaBetween Nation and Planet

Edited by Yuta Kaminishi and Jeff Kyong-McClain

Format

£95.00

About this book

This book explores how films from China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan engage with ecological thought in the Anthropocene

  • Moving beyond national cinema and planetary perspective by proposing East Asia as a critical region for understanding ecocinema
  • Fostering cross-cultural and transnational analysis by bringing together films from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan
  • Challenging dominant Western-centric frameworks of ecocriticism by foregrounding East Asian perspectives

Shedding light on the regional scale between the national cinema framework and the planetary perspective, East Asian Ecocinema: Between Nation and Planet argues for the importance of East Asia as a critical space for cinematic ecocriticism.

Drawing on the influential work of Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi on Sinophone ecocinema, and Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä’s transnational approach, the book brings together diverse perspectives that examine ecocinema in both national and transnational contexts.

Through promoting inter-East Asian conversations, the essays collectively reveal how films from East Asia can reframe global environmental discourse, decentering Hollywood and expanding ecocinema’s conceptual horizons.

Reviews

This book contextualizes films from East Asia within a regional, national, and especially planetary context. The chapters shed light on environmental issues that pertain to regions and nation-states in East Asia and issues that extend to the broader scale of the planet in our time, or the “Anthropocene.” This book project felicitously includes a broad range of films that have been little discussed in English, bringing awareness in global film studies to the range of ecopolitical issues within East Asian cinema.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on the Contributors

List of Figures

Introduction
Yuta Kaminishi and Jeff Kyong-McClain

Part I Representing Disaster

1. The Ecocinematics of Asian Nuclear Disaster: Visualizing Fukushima in the Netflix Series The Days
Rachel DiNitto

2. The Politics of the Eco-apocalyptic Redirection: East Asian Cinema and Its Representation of Environmental Catastrophe
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

3. Ecology and Disaster: Korean Society at the End of the World as We Know It
Sung-Ae Lee

Part II Landscape and Energy

4. Energy Justice in the Reform Era: On Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Portrayal of Coal Miners
Xingming Wang

5. The Ruins of Diasporic Memories: Remembering Iriomote Coal Mine in Green Jail
Yuta Kaminishi

6. Connected through Vulnerability: Chai Jing’s Under the Dome
Donghui He

7. Cognitive Ambience and the Tourist Gaze: Visual Perception in When Ruoma Was Seventeen
Xinmin Liu

Part III Alternative Sci-fi Imagination
8. Embracing a Hybridity of Chinese Sci-fi: On Journey to the West (2021) and its Ecological Implications
Shuwen Yang

9. Falling, Wasting and Commoning: The Afterlives of Space Debris in UFO in Her Eyes
Rui Xie

10. Thoughts in the Aughts (Zeronendai), Anime, and Ecocinema
Ai-Ting Chung

Epilogue
Erin James

References

Index

About the contributors

Yuta Kaminishi

Yuta Kaminishi is an assistant professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. His work appears in Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and Screen Bodies.

Jeff Kyong-McClain

Dr Jeff Kyong-McClain is the director of the Habib Institute for Asian Studies and an associate professor of history at the University of Idaho. He is co-editor of From Missionary Education to Confucius Institutes: Historical Reflections on Sino-American Cultural Exchange (2023) and Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization (2022).

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