In recent years, the world has witnessed a spike in the number of tragedies involving environmental refugees, the most salient being the almost daily drowning of Third World migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. These events expose the unjust spatial order of capitalist modernity, with elites enjoying wholesome environments of affluence in spaces segregated from the degraded, unlivable environments of the vast majority of humanity. This chapter addresses these environmental injustices of capitalist modernity from an ecocritical perspective, putting Hao Jingfang’s speculative novella Folding Beijing into conversation with three other works of China’s post-socialist era: Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, Lu Chuan’s Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, and Ah Cheng’s The King of Trees. Through close-reading, this chapter identifies in each of the narratives spatial divisions and concomitant environmental injustices consistent with Folding Beijing’s “Third,” “Second,” and “First” spaces. At the same time, this paper argues that these narratives provide a vision, dubbed “Fourth Space,” which draws upon a residual, pre-capitalist cosmogony involving ritual kin-making relations among humans and between humans and extra-human beings. In its attention to kin-making which is just and righteous, Fourth Space transcends spatial divisions and spurs political action for the recuperation of a world degraded by capitalist modernity.

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Fourth Space: Kin-Making Against Capitalist Modernity in Post-Socialist China

  • Aaron Gilkison

摘要

In recent years, the world has witnessed a spike in the number of tragedies involving environmental refugees, the most salient being the almost daily drowning of Third World migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. These events expose the unjust spatial order of capitalist modernity, with elites enjoying wholesome environments of affluence in spaces segregated from the degraded, unlivable environments of the vast majority of humanity. This chapter addresses these environmental injustices of capitalist modernity from an ecocritical perspective, putting Hao Jingfang’s speculative novella Folding Beijing into conversation with three other works of China’s post-socialist era: Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, Lu Chuan’s Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, and Ah Cheng’s The King of Trees. Through close-reading, this chapter identifies in each of the narratives spatial divisions and concomitant environmental injustices consistent with Folding Beijing’s “Third,” “Second,” and “First” spaces. At the same time, this paper argues that these narratives provide a vision, dubbed “Fourth Space,” which draws upon a residual, pre-capitalist cosmogony involving ritual kin-making relations among humans and between humans and extra-human beings. In its attention to kin-making which is just and righteous, Fourth Space transcends spatial divisions and spurs political action for the recuperation of a world degraded by capitalist modernity.