Book Description

This collection opens the geospatiality of “Asia” into an environmental framework called "Oceania" and pushes this complex regional multiplicity towards modes of trans-local solidarity, planetary consciousness, multi-sited decentering, and world belonging. At the transdisciplinary core of this “worlding” process lies the multiple spatial and temporal dynamics of an environmental eco-poetics, articulated via thinking and creating both with and beyond the Pacific and Asia imaginary.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Unearthing and Historicizing Regions

Chapter 1: Geo-Political Fantasy: Continental Action Movies

Chapter 2: Transpacific and Interracial World-Making in Eddie Huang’s Fresh Off the Boat

Chapter 3: The Place of Worlding: Subaltern Cosmopolitanism in Central Asia and Korea

Chapter 4: Beyond Complicities: China as Eco-Peril and Worlding the Techno-Dystopian

Chapter 5: Queering South Pacific into Ono Hai in Leche

Chapter 6: My Beast, My Brother, and My Alpha Creation in Taiwanese Sci Fi

Part 2: Activism, Vision, and Intervention

Chapter 7: Violence, Magic, Certainty: Towards a Journalistic Worlding of the Middle East

Chapter 8: Refugee Migration through the Division System: On the Ethics of Co-Presence in 

Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean

Chapter 9: The Crusades and a Marginal History of Islam: Tariq Ali's Activism and 

Alternative World in The Book of Saladin

Chapter 10: Zeugmatic Formations: Balikbayan Boxes and the Filipino Diaspora Across 

Asia-Pacific Worlds

Chapter 11: Call Me Ishimaru: Sailing Transpacific Worlds of Labor and Community from 

Japan to Brazil to the Americas

Part 3: Planetary Creation: Critique and Cosmos

Chapter 12: Friction or Flow? Ecological Transnationalism in Japanese Animation

Chapter 13: Hurricanes and Kaiju: Climate Change and Toxicity Across the Pacific in 

Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim

Chapter 14: Albatross Unbound: Worlding the Plastic Sea

Chapter 15: Agrarianism, Disappointment, and the Mystery of Witnessing

Chapter 16: Listening to Archipelagic Rains

Chapter 17: Trans-indigenous Coalitions and Ecological Ties Across Oceania (poetry)

Chapter 18: Epilogue: Reworlding Asia: Towards Alchemies of Planetary Regeneration

About the Authors

Shiuhhuah Serena Chou is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Her research interests include transpacific agricultural environmentalism, Asian American environmental literature, and medical-environmental humanities. She is author of numerous scholarly and creative publications on American organic farming literature and culture and gardens with her colleagues in her office rooftop farm.

Soyoung Kim is Professor of Cinema Studies at Korea National University of Arts, South Korea, and Director of Trans: Asia Screen Culture Institute. She is author of Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster, Trans-Cinema (forthcoming) and has published numerous books in Korean on Postcolonial modernity, gender, and cinema. As a filmmaker, she directed ‘Exile Trilogy’ set in Central Asia, Russia, and Korea and ‘Women's History Trilogy’. She taught at UC Berkeley and Duke University, USA, as a visiting professor.

Rob Wilson received a doctorate in English from the University of California at Berkeley, USA, where he was founding editor of Berkeley Poetry Review. He is author of a dual-language poetry book When the Nikita Moon Rose (2021) and Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists (2010). He teaches literature, cultural studies, and creative writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA.