Contemporary East Asian Poetics: Technology, Ecology, and Intermedial Fluidity
Description
In the half-century following World War II, East Asian nations experienced unprecedented economic growth, during which technological advancement and ecological awareness emerged as two of the most salient threads of social development. These dynamics have profoundly reshaped the critical trajectories of contemporary East Asian poetics. The composite relation of “ecology-technology” has generated and defined new literary spaces: ecologies shaped by technological intervention and mediation exhibit complex topological formations. These encompass not only the natural ecology and the multispecies ecology emphasized in posthumanism, but also the political-economic ecology, as well as the digital ecology intertwined with new media and generative AI. As poiesis, poetry inherently bears the qualities of technique, allowing us to explore the compound relation of “ecology-technology” from both within and beyond literature itself.
Specifically, in terms of contemporary ecological writing in East Asian, it often occupies a profound paradox: it celebrates nature’s abundance and mourns its disappearance. Timothy Morton rightly points out this tension (2010), stating that while ecological writing appears intrinsically elegiac—since nature becomes the ultimate lost object—the ecological threat actually reverses the traditional elegiac form.
This paradox reveals the predicament of contemporary East Asian poetics: How can we write about nature ethically? Can ecological writing transcend the elegiac mode to address ecological fragility? More broadly, what happens when poetry confronts the entanglements of technological mediation and ecological crisis? How do contemporary East Asian literatures register the interplay between natural environments and technical infrastructures, between cultural memory and the algorithmic present? These questions call for new theoretical frameworks that can articulate the intersections between place, loss, and literary expression.
Geopoetics, for instance, offers such a framework, operating on dual conceptual levels that directly address Morton’s paradox of ecological mourning. ‘Geo’ functions both literally through geographical and environmental specificity, and figuratively through the Chinese concept of ‘Geo’ (di地 ), which encompasses the tangible texture of place (zhidi 质地) and projections of the heart-mind (jiandi 见地). This dual framework enables us to examine how writers across cultures and environments negotiate the tension between celebrating place and mourning its vulnerability.
This panel invites contributions that explore how contemporary East Asian poetics—across poetry, manga, film, fiction, and internet culture—navigate these intersecting terrains. We are particularly interested in works spanning from the 1950s to the present, in which questions of ecological urgency, technological mediation, and intermedial fluidity intersect.
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Speaker Bio
Dr CHEN Hazel Shu is a lecturer at the Division of Languages and Communication, CPCE, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and obtained her PhD in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her scholarly interests encompass sound studies, Sinophone literature and culture, transnational cinema and visual culture. Her publications appear in Sound Studies, Babel, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, etc.
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Zhenyu Xu, PhD candidate, University of Cambridge.
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Liang-Jing Y Zhu, born in March 2002 in Hefei, Anhui Province, holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Pursued postgraduate studies in Comparative Literature at University College London and is currently a Ph.D. student in School of International Letters and Cultures (SILC) at Arizona State University.
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Liu Xiaoyu, PhD from Peking University, is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Xiamen University. With over ten academic articles published in prestigious journals. Dr. Liu has also been granted the National Social Science Fund for Youth Projects, presiding over research on "Modernity in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature of the Nanyang Region." Additionally, Dr. Liu has works featured in pure literature publications.
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Huiwen is a senior lecturer at the Division of Languages and Communication at CPCE, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She completed her PhD in the School of English at The University of Hong Kong. Her thesis won her the outstanding research student award. Her research interests lie in contemporary poetics, life writing, and service-learning. She writes theatre reviews in Chinese, and creative nonfiction and poetry in English. She is finishing a book on Seamus Heaney and contemporary elegy.
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Zheng Yi is an MPhil candidate in the School of Humanities at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He holds an MA in China Studies from SOAS, University of London, and undertook half-year studies in philosophy at KU Leuven. His research examines emerging theoretical approaches and ecological possibilities in modern Chinese literature. He has previously published in the SOAS Journal of Postgraduate Research with a paper entitled “The Never Fixed Chinese Characteristics”.
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Yinyin Xue is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Rhodes College. Her research interests span twentieth-century Chinese literature, cultural history, science and technology studies, and media and cultural studies. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Twentieth-Century China, American Journal of Chinese Studies, and Asian Cinema. Her current work explores environmental perception in modern Chinese literature.
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Sasha Karsavina is a PhD student at Yale University in Slavic Studies and Film and Media Studies, where she studies late socialist science fiction and media histories through a comparative lens. Her writings and translations have been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, n+1, ISOLARII, The New Inquiry, PEN America, and Columbia Journal.
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Born and raised in Beijing, Chen Zhongzhi is currently an MA student in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He holds a BA in English and European Cultural Studies from Brandeis University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. A published author of poetry, fiction, and translation in both Chinese and English, his creative works can be found in English-language magazines such as Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism & Translation and The Emerson Review.
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Xuemeng Zhang is a PhD candidate in China and Inner Asia Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her current research explores contemporary Chinese poetry and its intersections with Artificial Intelligence, alongside broader interests in translation studies, creative literary pedagogy, and intermediality. Xuemeng received her master's degree in Arts, Creativity and Education (distinction) from the University of Cambridge.
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Casey Tilley is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow of Comparative Literature at Penn State. Their research examines grassroots workers' and industrial poetry of China and Latin America as ecopoetic and ecocritical interventions in the era of neoliberal globalization.