At Home in the World: Wandering Earth, Environmentalism, and Reimagined Homelands

Carlos Rojas

doi:10.1515/jcfs-2021-0017

Article

At Home in the World: Wandering Earth, Environmentalism, and Reimagined Homelands

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).

Published/Copyright: September 10, 2021

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From the journal Journal of Chinese Film Studies Volume 1 Issue 2

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.

Keywords: Cixin Liu; environmentalism; Frant Gwo; the Anthropocene; wandering Earth

Corresponding author: Carlos Rojas, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University, 2204 Erwin Road, Box 90414, Durham, NC, USA, E-mail: c.rojas@duke.edu

About the author

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).

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Published Online: 2021-09-10

Published in Print: 2021-11-25

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jcfs-2021-0017

Keywords for this article

Cixin Liu; environmentalism; Frant Gwo; the Anthropocene; wandering Earth