At Home in the World: Wandering Earth, Environmentalism, and Reimagined Homelands
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Carlos Rojas
Carlos Rojas is professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies, and the Cinematic Arts at Duke University. He is the author, editor, and translator of numerous books, including
Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2015).
Abstract
Based on a 2000 novella by Cixin Liu with the same title, Frant Gwo’s 2019 film Wandering Earth has been celebrated as China’s first big-budget science fiction film. As a Chinese film with a global theme that simultaneously targets both a domestic and an international audience, accordingly, the work invites a reflection on the relationship between the local and the global—on how we understand the concept of home, and what it might mean to be home in the world. This essay, accordingly, examines three intersecting ways in which Wandering Earth (both the film and the original novella) explores the relationship between home and the world, including the status of the Earth as an ecological system, the planet’s status as a lived environment, as well as a set of contemporary geopolitical discourses about China’s shifting position within the contemporary world order, and particularly its relationship to the Global South.
About the author
Carlos Rojas is professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies, and the Cinematic Arts at Duke University. He is the author, editor, and translator of numerous books, including Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2015).
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- At Home in the World: Wandering Earth, Environmentalism, and Reimagined Homelands
- Looking Backwards and Forwards: The Development of Film Art in the People’s Republic of China
- Xia Yan and the Chinese School of Film
- Interview
- The Chivalry of a Martial Artist – Interview with Wu Jing
- Research Articles
- Analysis of China’s Film Industry in 2020
- Shi-nematic afterimages: semiocapitalism and Chinese cine-cities
- The Current Problems of Aesthetic Creation in Chinese Film Art
- The Generation, Transformation, and Dissipation of the “Sixth Generation” Cinema in China: The Entropy Change of a Concept
- The Imaginative Impulse: Philosophies of Film and Chinese Aesthetic Sensibilities
- Queering Bodies: “Becoming-unrecognisable” in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together
- “In the Dark Places, Getting Burned”: Portrayals of Street Culture in Taiwan Cinema Today
- New Mainstream Films and Television Dramas in China: The Construction of Industrial Aesthetics and Consumption of Youth Culture
- The Regional Rootedness of China’s Film Industry: Cluster Development and Attempts at Cross-Location Integration
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- At Home in the World: Wandering Earth, Environmentalism, and Reimagined Homelands
- Looking Backwards and Forwards: The Development of Film Art in the People’s Republic of China
- Xia Yan and the Chinese School of Film
- Interview
- The Chivalry of a Martial Artist – Interview with Wu Jing
- Research Articles
- Analysis of China’s Film Industry in 2020
- Shi-nematic afterimages: semiocapitalism and Chinese cine-cities
- The Current Problems of Aesthetic Creation in Chinese Film Art
- The Generation, Transformation, and Dissipation of the “Sixth Generation” Cinema in China: The Entropy Change of a Concept
- The Imaginative Impulse: Philosophies of Film and Chinese Aesthetic Sensibilities
- Queering Bodies: “Becoming-unrecognisable” in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together
- “In the Dark Places, Getting Burned”: Portrayals of Street Culture in Taiwan Cinema Today
- New Mainstream Films and Television Dramas in China: The Construction of Industrial Aesthetics and Consumption of Youth Culture
- The Regional Rootedness of China’s Film Industry: Cluster Development and Attempts at Cross-Location Integration
