Call for book chapters: “Sinophonecene? Tracing environmental and cohabitational perspectives in the art of China”

The Research Network for Modern and Contemporary Chinese Artis is inviting Book Chapter Submissions for the edited volume “Sinophonecene? Tracing environmental and cohabitational perspectives in the art of China”.

Submission deadline: Friday, May 31^st 2024

Please send your inquiries and submission to: mococa@web.de

The Hong Kong based artist Zheng Bo uses the phrase “You are the 0,01%” to highlight the infinitesimal role that humans play in the planet’s biomass. Using grass as an organic medium, he creates a living sculpture of the shockingly small number that stands in complete disproportion to the disastrous impact humans have had on Earth. Zheng is one among a growing number of artists in the Sinophone world, who investigate different forms of cohabitation and interspecies relationships, prompting viewers to consider what planetary thinking means in relation to being locally situated. 

Following these artists’ lead, the edited volume “Sinophonecene? Tracing environmental and cohabitational perspectives in the art of China” will explore the particularities of planetary aesthetics within the Chinese context-–a region that, after historically suffering from the consequences of modern anthropocentrism and mass industrialization, has recently developed into the key driving force of global capitalism and extractivism. It is also a region that is intrinsically linked to traumatic experiences of imperialism and colonialism, followed by other authoritarian regimes, which effectively up-rooted earlier cosmological understandings and aesthetic negotiations of man’s (minor) place in the world. Therefore, despite an increasingly shared awareness, the growing environmental concerns expressed in artistic practices from the 1970s and onwards in Europe and North-America have reached the Sinophone world differently. 

Since the 1970s, human-made catastrophes such as nuclear melt-downs, deforestation, sea pollution, and consequences of global warming have repeatedly driven people into the streets and urged artists to take action around the globe. The natural sciences have prominently responded with a growing cross-disciplinary discourse crystallizing around the concept of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stroemer 2000) that provoked a range of alternative concepts in the humanities such as Capitalocene (Malm 2016; Ruccio 2011, Haraway 2016) and Chtulucene (Haraway 2016). The latter critically acknowledge the global crisis caused by anthropocentrism, but seek notions of the world that allow for a more relational and a less human-centered worldview. Post-modernist and post-colonial discussions in the field of art history have been particularly informed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s book Death of a Discipline (2003) proposing a planetary frame to reconsider natural spaces as intrinsically related with us and inhabited by powerful non-human agents, who counteract the hierarchical political and human-centered spaces defined by globalization. The discussion has grown to include literature, visual arts, and cultural studies that explore the idea of planetary aesthetics (Elias and Moraru 2015; Ballard 2021) and propose an alternative “worlding” through art (Pheng Cheah 2008; Kaiser 2014; Peeren 2022; also compare the project “Worlding Public Cultures” 2020-23). It asks to un-learn the hegemonic and violent modern episteme that revolves around the dichotomy between nature and Man with a capital “M”, conceiving of himself as the (white, male) master of the universe (Sylvia Winter 2003). More recently, and in productive tension with it, the concept of the Sinophonecene has been introduced, highlighting the considerable environmental impact of the greater Chinese region as one of the most densely populated areas on the planet (Hai 2022).

Our edited volume will build on these suggestions by querying the fundamental observation of “the planetary as a post-anthropocentric framework [that] shows artistic engagements of environmental issues as both locally grounded and simultaneously planetary” (Hai et al. 2022, 25). We will focus on artistic practices regarding cohabitation as a spatially defined as well as an inter-species related response to this challenge.

What resonates differently with the aforementioned concepts is the question of how we can inhabit the planet with other species in a conscious manner. This question allows us to tease out local cultural, (art) historical, biological, cosmological, and aesthetic aspects of the planet and planetary practice in order to further challenge the notion of the Anthropocene.

We welcome case study-based contributions that respond to one or more of the following questions, but do not have to be limited to them: 

• How does art from the Sinophone region negotiate the planetary complex and respond to the climate breakdown, capitalist extractivism, and environmental destruction?
• What kind and how does art envision, enable, or even perform ideas and practices of cohabitation?
• Are there culturally or historically specific ways of imagining interspecies relationships, non-human centered cosmologies, and modes of cohabitation?
• Is a term like “Sinophonecene” opening a new chapter of planetary discussion? Or does it inverse the cultural essentialist, nationalist, and human-centered thought of a “Chinese way” that contradicts a relational positionality?

Details:

• Chapter texts: 6000 – max. 8000 words, excluding footnotes (footnotes should be kept to a minimum) (please get in touch for the detailed style sheet)
• Short biography (max. 200 words) of the author
• Contact details and university affiliation (if applicable) of the author

Submit your manuscript to the co-editors Dr. Franziska Koch, Nora Wölfing, and Cila Brosius attached to an e-mail at mococal@web.de until 31 May 2024. The edited volume will be submitted to a double peer review and published by an international scholarly publisher.

References:

Cheah, Pheng. “What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity.” Daedalus. On Cosmopolitanism – Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 137, no. 3 (2008): 26–38.

Ballard, Susan. Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021.

Crist, Eileen. “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature.” In: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, pp. 14-33. Oakland: PM Press, 2016.

Haraway, Donna J. “Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, pp. 34-76. Oakland: PM Press, 2016.

Kaiser, Birgit Mara. “Worlding CompLit: Diffractive Reading with Barad, Glissant and Nancy,” Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 274–87.

Peeren, Esther. “Worlding Popular Culture,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory, ed. Christian Moraru and Jeffrey R. Di Leo (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 119–30.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline, The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Ren, Hai, Zheng Bo, and Mali Wu. “Portfolio: Planetary Art in the Sinophonecene: An Introduction.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8(2), fall 2022, 24-45.

Zhang, Connie. “The Perpetual Present, Past, and Future: Slow Violence and Chinese Frameworks of In/Visibility and Time in Zhao Liang’s Behemoth.” In: The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited by T.J. Demos, pp. 119-129. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021.

Worlding Public Cultures. The Arts and Social Innovation, Trans-Atlantic Research Platform with an up-coming eponymous publication series (ICI Publishers Berlin, winter 2022).

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation-An Argument.” The New Centennial Review 3(3), 2003, 257-337.

Crutzen, Paul J. and ​​Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” IGBP Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17-18.

Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital:  The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London:  Verso, 2016.

Ruccio, David F. 2011. “Anthropocene – or How the World Was Remade by Capitalism,” (March 4), https://anticap.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/anthropocene%E2%80%94or-how-the-world-was-remade-by-capitalism/.Ren, Hai. “Aesthetics of Futurism. Lu Yang’s Art and an Organological Redefinition of the Human in the Planetary Age.” Screen Bodies 7, no. 1 (2022): 93–110. https://doi.org/10.3167/screen.2022.070106 Titel anhand dieser DOI in Citavi-Projekt übernehmen.

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