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China and Inner Asia
Victor Seow
Harvard University, United States
Micah Muscolino
University of California, San Diego, United States
Chris Courtney
Durham University, United Kingdom
Ruth Rogaski
Vanderbilt University, United States
Victor Seow
Harvard University, United States
Ling Zhang
Boston College, United States
Micah Muscolino
University of California, San Diego, United States
From novels like Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide (荒潮) to short stories like Gu Shi’s “Poems and Distant Lands” (为了生命的诗与远方), recent works of Chinese fiction have served as an important site for reckoning with the deepening reality of environmental problems and ecological crises. Through tales of such things as life and labor in e-waste landfills or the unplanned emergence of synthetic ocean ecologies, these stories raise questions about the workings of our despoiled world. As tellers of stories ourselves, how are historians to pen narratives of the past in this era of the Anthropocene? This issue is particularly poignant for those of us who write about environmental transformations in China, which, by most measures, is central both as a setting and an actor in what all-too-often seems to be an unfolding tragedy. This roundtable brings together several historians of the Chinese environment to draw from their recent and ongoing work and reflect on the narrativization of nature and the nature of narratives. Christopher Courtney asks about the use of personal stories and oral histories in constructing accounts of ecological change. Ruth Rogaski probes possibilities of encountering the non-human world without the interference of the state. Victor Seow inquiries into who and what does work in histories of energy and the environment. Ling Zhang mediates on writing about human and non-human materiality in a way that eschews conceptual frames like agency and nature. And Micah Muscolino, who will also serve as our chair and moderator, explores the question of whether our narratives of China’s environment can or, indeed, should be told in anything other than declensionist terms. Together, we aim to open up a broader discussion among panelists and other participants about the place of the environment in Chinese history, the place of China in global environmental history, and why and how the manner by which we tell these stories matters.