Call For Papers (Deadline December 30, 2023)
Special Issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas
Energy and Media
Guest Editors: Weixian Pan (Queen’s University), Yandong Li (University of Washington)
Timeline:
December 30, 2023: Abstract of 350-500 words and author bios of 100 words maximum
May 30, 2024: Full article draft due
October 30, 2024: Article revisions due
Late 2024/early 2025: Special issue published
We invite essays that bridge studies of Chinese film and media with the burgeoning field of environmental humanities, with a particular focus on energy culture. In the past two decades, concepts such as “eco-media” and “media environment” have generated debates on the mediation of ecological crises, the philosophy of nature, and the materiality of media technologies (for example, Lu and Mi 2009; Chang 2019; Litzinger and Yang 2020; Bao et al. 2023). Whereas energy culture is deeply embedded in these concepts and prior debates, the distinct geographies and political economy call for different approaches to trace energy’s infrastructure, vectors of connections and disruptions, and in turn, how media becomes an integral part of the theorization and implementation of energy regimes (Mukherjee 2020; Cooper et al. 2023).
We see the urgency to continue the conversation between media culture and energy politics in the context of China, echoing existing efforts from energy historians of China such as Vaclav Smil, Victor Seow, and Hou Li. At the same time, we take this renewed interest in energy as an opportunity to unveil some of the invisible, ephemeral, technological and material flows that energize understanding of Chinese film and media. Therefore, we are interested in essays that contribute to this ongoing project to trace the forms of energy in Chinese film and media and explore how media shapes the historical and contemporary knowledge on energy. Essays examining transnational connections of media and energy are particularly welcome. Topics include but are not limited to:
- Cinema and media of resource exploration/extraction
- Ecologies of media waste and residuals
- History of visualizing energy and/or energy infrastructure
- Elemental relations in Chinese film and media
- Geographies and geopolitics of energy and extraction (coal, wind, oil, rare earth)
- Ethnic and indigenous dynamics in mediation of energy
- Design protocols, architecture, and standards of industrial and agricultural energy management
- Energy economy of Artificial Intelligence, data centers, and cloud computing
- Energy in Chinese computational media theory and cybernetics
- Media Labor and Energy politics
Abstracts and questions should be addressed to the special issue editors:
Weixian Pan (weixian.pan@queensu.ca), Yandong Li (yandong@uw.edu)
Bibliography
Bao, Weihong, Jacob Gaboury, and Daniel Morgan. 2023. “Introduction: Medium/Environment.” Critical Inquiry 49 (3): 301–14.
Chang, Chia-ju, ed. 2019. Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins. Cham: Springer International Publishing Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cooper, Zane Griffin Talley, Jordan B. Kinder, Anne Pasek, and Cindy Kaiying Lin. 2023. Digital Energetics. Minneapolis, Lüneburg: University of Minnesota Press / meson press.
Li, Hou. 2018. Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Litzinger, Ralph, and Fan Yang. 2020. “Eco-Media Events in China: From Yellow Eco-Peril to Media Materialism.” Environmental Humanities 12 (1): 1–22.
Lu, Sheldon H., and Jiayan Mi, eds. 2009. Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Mukherjee, Rahul. 2020. Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty. Sign, Storage, Transmission. Durham: Duke University Press.
Seow, Victor. 2022. Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia. University of Chicago Press.
Smil, Vaclav. 1993. China’s Environmental Crisis : an Inquiry into the Limits of National Development. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe.