Taiwan is facing environmental problems that can be described broadly by
resorting to globalization studies scholar Ulrich Bech’s use of the term “global
risk.” A more accurate if also more polemical understanding of risk is postcolonial ecocriticism scholar Rob Nixon’s “unequally distributed catastrophe.”
This chapter critically underscores the latter kind of risk, as it is playing out
in East Asia, through the work of writers who question institutionalized policies and practices deleterious to planetary environmentally sustainable cultures and communities. In response to those policies and practices, scholars
situated in the environmental humanities emphasize ecocritical arguments
in literature and other kinds of cultural production that speak for preserving
and caring for as opposed to replacing Earth’s oldest environments. Such
arguments distinguish the work of Ming-yi Wu (吳明益), Guangzhong Yu
(余光中), Ming Xiang (向明), Qiao Zhong (鍾喬), and Hung Hung (鴻鴻),
writers who are the main focus of this chapter. It highlights critical connections that Wu implicitly makes between indigenous rights and environmental
rights in his novel The Man with the Compound Eyes, critiques of anthropogenic culture that Yu and Xiang make in several poems, and the eco-activist
poetic messages of Zhong and Hung.
關聯:
Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing: New Ecological Perspectives from East Asia
