Book Talk-Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan

Spinsored by
AMES Presents, CAMEH, APSI, and the Taiwan Studies Working Group

Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023)
Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Informed by field research, Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, contrasting a dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies. By centering Indigenous cosmologies, Questioning Borders aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing.

Robin Visser, Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializes in modern Chinese and Sinophone literatures, environmental humanities, Indigenous studies, and urban cultural studies. Her book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia University Press, 2023), compares contemporary literature on the environment by Han Chinese and non-Han Indigenous writers. Her earlier book, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Duke University Press, 2010), translated into Russian (Academic Studies Press, 2022), analyzes Chinese urban planning, fiction, cinema, art, architecture, and intellectual debates at the turn of the twenty-first century. She has received a Taiwan Fellowship (2025) for research on spiritualities in Indigenous literatures of Taiwan and an ACLS Collaborative Grant (2024), "Diversifying Humanistic Pedagogy in China Studies: Incorporating Ethnic Minority Literary and Cultural Productions into North American College Classrooms." She is the recipient of research fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies, is co-organizer of the Triangle Environmental Humanities Seminar, and is a member of the Carolina Seminar on Global Indigeneity and American Indian Studies.