Hooray, The Carlsberg Foundation has awarded me a 2-year fellowship to study literary plants in and beyond contemporary global Sinophone fiction! I’ll be located at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Arts and Cultural Studies and affiliated with the Art&Earth cluster but doing my own solo-project.

I’ll be looking at prominent plant characters in novels and short stories from a variety of genres including speculative fiction, eco realism, surrealism, science fiction, and literary fiction. And I’ll be creating a theoretical framework around 3 nodes: critical plant studies, posthuman feminism, and translation studies. Yeah, I’m excited. Here is a short extract from the project plan:

Plant People: Posthuman Ecologies in Contemporary Fiction

Can being more plant-like help us live more sustainably? In recent years, it has become abundantly clear that humans desperately need to rethink themselves not as masters of the universe but as co-inhabitants and carers for planet Earth.

Literature is the perfect trial ground for such radical thought experiments. In my research, I combine a more-than-human perspective on planetary ecologies with a postcolonial approach to world literature to explore how thinking and writing with plants can help us move beyond the Anthropocene.

In the study of literature, plants have traditionally been categorised as poetic metaphors or ambient backdrops for narrative action.  Although such passive perspectives may have been adequate in the past, the ongoing environmental crisis demands a more nuanced and theoretically informed approach.

Building on previous aesthetic and ecocritical research on “nature” as a general category often used to criticise human hubris (Chen; Thornber), my project goes one step further than human-nature antagonism and looks at entangled plant-people perspectives on our planet.

By analysing fiction in Chinese –second only to English as a world language– from around the globe, this project aids the much-needed democratisation of world literature (Apter; Nuttall) and highlights environmental humanities as an essential discipline for understanding 21^st century planetary realities.

Ref

Apter, Emily. 2019. ‘Untranslatability and the geopolitics of reading’. PMLA 134 (1): 194-200.
Chen, Wangheng. 2007. Huanjing meixue 环境美学 [Environmental Aesthetics]. Wuhan: Wuhan University Press.
Nuttall, Sarah. 2021. “World Literature as Planetary Literature.” In D. Ganguly (ed.), The Cambridge History of World Literature, pp. 924-941. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Thornber, Karen. 2012. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.