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Animal and the Human Other in Contemporary Asian Media and Literature
Organizer: Chia-ju Chang, Trinity University
Chair and Discussant: Steven L. Riep, Brigham Young University
Animals are “good to think with” not simply because they help humans understand human society but because doing so reminds us that they are the co-occupants of this planet. In American and European societies, animals in cultural productions often appear as a backdrop to the human drama; their pre-linguistic voices are mediated by other power discourses; their bodies are “blank paper,” writes Keith Tester, “can be inscribed with any message.” It is not until recently that a consensus has emerged that a moral analysis of oppression of Other such as gender, race/ethnicity, class requires an extended analysis of nonhuman animals. With the growing westernization of Asian cultures, animals have become or already been treated as objects without intrinsic value. This panel covers diverse cultural representations of animals and their relations with the human Other from different Asian cultures including China, India, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Taiwan.
Three papers redress an anthropocentric vision and question the boundary of speciesism. Li Hua explores different uses of animal figures as well as their interaction with the human Other in three contemporary novels in China and argues for a gradual emergence of animal awareness in Chinese literary scene. Chia-ju Chang examines Chinese and Taiwanese literary and filmic narratives that utilize woman-animal tropes for an assessment of various ecofeminist agendas. Using recent Asian experimental ethnographic cinema, Anat Pick deconstructs the traditional visuality and formulates a more fluid notion of “ethnography” to construct a new ethnographic subjectivity that counters Western anthropocentric hegemony.
Bugs from the Nether World: Animals in Three Contemporary Chinese Stories
Hua Li, University of British Columbia, Canada
This paper focuses on the diversified human-animal relationships revealed in three contemporary Chinese stories: Su Tong’s Northern Zone of the City (1995), Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004) and Jia Pingwa’s Reminiscence of Wolf (2000). In Northern Zone of the City, when human beings are deprived of the right to speak, and are too vulnerable to control their own fates, during times of high political repression, moral degeneration and social disorder, such as during the Cultural Revolution, animals become the agent of human being, or extension of human life, manifesting silenced voices and thwarted free will. In Wolf Totem, the non-human animal-oriented discourse subverts the stereotype image of wolf, and discloses that human being’s detest and killing of wolf are all for the benefits of human existence. The story also touches upon the issues of extinction of species and domestication. Reminiscence of Wolf emphasizes accrete relation between hunter and wolf with an allegorical ending that along with the extinction of wolf in the local area, the hunters all suffer from muscle atrophy.
The above three stories challenge and redress the anthropocentric human-animal relationship and suggest a more objective perspective, while not excluding human culture, to re-evaluate the interaction between the “self” and “other”, between human beings and animals in ecosystem.
Woman-Animal Trope in Contemporary Fiction and Film across the Taiwan Strait
Chia-ju Chang, Trinity University
This paper examines a continuation of the woman-animal trope deriving from premodern Chinese folklore in contemporary novels and films through selected works of literature and films across the Taiwan Strait from the 1980s and onward. They are: Li Ang’s novella The Butcher’s Wife (Taiwan 1983); Tsui Hark’s film Green Snake (Hong Kong 1993); Wang Siu-di’s animation Grandma and Her Ghosts (1998 Taiwan), and Lou Ye’s film Suzhou River (China 2000). Literally or metaphorically, the woman-animal connection in these works raises essential questions: Does the intersection between these two serve as a ground for a cross-examination of male domination and exploitation, as argued by social ecofeminists? Or, is the alliance a form of empowerment and celebratory communion privileged only by women, as claimed by primitive, spiritual ecofeminists?
In order to answer these questions, I need to take gender of the author and genre of the work into account. I argue that the social realist novella and fantastic-comedy animation, both by females, assert clear-cut ecofeminist agendas concerning issues of subalternization and agency, depending on which ecofeminist position the author occupies. Conversely, both male directors construct a strong woman-animal binding but obscure a political agenda. While Tsui Hark’s adaptation of Lilian Lee’s novel invents his own version of ecofeminism to counter an ascetic version of patriarchy, the totemic animal/woman is subject to male gaze/desire. In a similar light, Lou Ye’s obsessive filmic capturing of the fantastic woman-animal is a gesture of ultimate objectification of both woman and animal.
Ecovisions: Documenting Animals in Recent Ethnographic Film
Anat Pick, University of East London, United Kingdom
This paper explores recent experimental ethnographic cinema from Asia which center on animals: Vladimir Tyulkin’s About Love (Kazakhstan, 2005), Peter Brosens’ State of Dogs (Mongolia, 1998), and Thomas Balmès’ Maharajah Burger (France, 2000). All these films propose we reconsider our own anthropocentric visual habits. They articulate cinema’s potential for shaping another reality, one not centred strictly on human form, vision, and identity. This reassessment is valuable in the field of ethnography, and so, it is not surprising that some of the most innovative attempts to introduce a nonhuman cinematic perspective, have occurred within the realm of what Catherine Russell termed “experimental ethnography.” In terms of their rethinking of the conditions of vision, however, I argue that the films I discuss here should be thought as “visionary ethnography.”
Ethnographic film traditionally embodied the strained looking relations between “Self” and “Other”: between a Western observer and a non-Western observed. But whereas ethnography from its very inception never fully adhered to the clean-cut divisions between “us” and “them,” both the familiar (self), and its foreign “other” have remained, conceptually and concretely, human. The importance of ethnographic films about animals is twofold. First, these films insist that ethnographic curiosity passes through the animal. Second, they shift the visual centre of gravity away from the human, reflecting a broader environmental range in which the human is part of a larger order of life. There is here, therefore, a significant change in the status of ethnographic observation, as well as a new economy of seeing.
Farmwife, Paper‑cut, and Wolf ‑An Ecofeminist Reading of Jia Pingwa's Ku Mairong
Wei Qingqi, Nanjing Normal University
Abstract: Ecocriticism studies the relationship between literature‑culture and nature. Ecocriticism and feminism joined together are a unique and promising movement in the trend in which literary study is turning again outside. Various aspects of ecofeminism include the critique of patriarchal representation of nature as female, revisionist rehabilitation of the importance of women's roles in the history of natural history, and the advocacy of an "ethics of care" toward nature as against an ethics of extraction or exploitation, etc. Based on the theoretical platform of ecofeminism, this article rereads a Chinese masterpiece so as to justify both the "canon" and the "eco‑discipline". Via the eco‑perspective, we catch sight of a pair of "spindly and spooky" eyes of a countrywoman artist, which aroses inside us "a feeling of coming across a fox spirit". It is the spirit of art dancing on her dusty face. She cuts paper and she talks in her northern Shanxi accent about "waiting for that wolf to come back". The wild beast and the scissors oddly precipitate her artistic career.