Postcolonial Environmentalism 1: Hong Kong

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From the course by University of Zurich

Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition

оценки

University of Zurich

Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition

оценки

In this course, featuring many researchers from the University of Zurich and international institutions, we will introduce you to some of the most vibrant cultural trends addressing landscape appreciation, degradation, protection, and rehabilitation that currently circulate in the Asian hemisphere. You will learn how they are critically reflected upon in the context of the environmental humanities, and observe how an interdisciplinary approach towards regional ecosystems past and present reaches out beyond pragmatic technological solutions to mitigate environmental damage. Environmental humanities strive to change people’s prevalent attitudes, values and behavioural patterns in order to redeem the rapidly globalizing crisis. Having acquainted yourself with the stories Asia’s landscapes – and landscape representations – tell about actual and possible human-nature relationships, you can compare and evaluate their potential to bring about the desired change and define your own range of actions as an informed stakeholder for creating a sustainable future. What is arguably no less intriguing: you will learn how to appreciate a broad range of eco-aesthetic forms that re-enchant our lives by creatively interacting with the more-than-human world. You can follow the five modules of the course consecutively or just study the modules that interest you the most. If you want to earn a certificate, you need to complete all of the modules including the quizzes at the end of each module. THESE ARE THE TOPICS OF THE 5 MODULES OF THIS COURSE: Module 1: Concepts of landscape past and present and their cosmological underpinnings. Module 2: Entangled landscapes comprising cultural flows of concepts and forms, contemporary gardens on the move, nostalgic elegies of demolished sites and rural reconstruction projects. Module 3: Discussion of two religious communities in India (the Parsi-Zoroastrians and the Auroville community) and their relationship with the environment. Module 4: Environmental debates tackling religious concepts and social practices and the problem of waste disposal in India. Module 5: Environmental movements and the impact of Fukushima on attitudes towards nuclear energy in Japan, creative activism including arts projects and documentaries to protest against pollution and landscape degradation and raise environmental awareness in the Sinosphere, and emergent concepts for sustainable community life on the planet.

From the lesson

East Asian Environmentalism

In the last module of this course, we will look at how, in the age of the Anthropocene, the role of humans came to be conceptualized in opposition to nature, and assert the validity of certain traditional Asian ideas suggesting that we are not at the centre, nor in control of the environment. Furthermore, we will examine some of the ways in which the natural world has been “remade” within the planetary scope both discursively and materially - for instance, by way of a largely materialistic concept of historical progress encouraging industrialized resource extraction, colonial patterns of wealth accumulation, and unsustainable models of economic growth - which led to the transformation of entire ecosystems. We will moreover explore how political and economic stakeholders, activists and intellectuals in Asia get productively involved with these processes.

Postcolonial Environmentalism 1: Hong Kong9:32

Postcolonial Environmentalism 2: Taiwan11:09

Meet the Instructors

Andrea Riemenschnitter
Prof.
Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies

In this and the next video about postcolonial environmentalism,

we will introduce the theoretical and practical implications

of landscape protection schemes in postcolonial contexts.

We will first encounter the general problematic,

and then look more closely at narratives of colonial Hong Kong, in this video,

and various forms of environmental activism in postcolonial Taiwan in the next video.

The most fundamental difference between postcolonial movements and

environmental activism is a focus on socially marginalized people in the former case,

whereas environmentalism stresses the wellbeing of

whole ecosystems comprising populations of both human and non-human members.

Postcolonial intellectuals promote the dynamics of hybridity, for instance,

when redefining the rigid nationalistic concepts of race, culture,

language and histories, in order to account for

the internalized diversity of postcolonial nations.

Environmental movements are more concerned with

a particular place’s purity of soil, air, and water

– in other words, with protection and

ecological conservation, rather than hybridization and change.

Hence, the postcolonial master narrative tends to be predominantly connected to

historical (human) time, whereas environmental stories are more

frequently steered by concepts of space and deep (earth) time.

How can these different approaches be made to work hand in

hand, rather than contradict or hinder each other?

The missing link are first nations,

because indigenous people can rightly claim to possess a wealth of knowledge and

practices that enabled them to live in balance

with their natural environment for thousands of years.

In view of the environmental crisis

they began to advocate for cultural and biological diversity,

pronounce the environmental concerns and

interests of disowned and marginalized communities,

asserted their land rights and traditional ways of

land use, and formed transnational associations.

Therefore, they are now widely respected

as highly influential environmental change agents.

The International Labour Office’s 2016 Technical Note states:

“… indigenous peoples are affected in distinctive ways by

climate change as well as policies or actions aimed at addressing it.

… as change agents, indigenous peoples are essential to the success of

policies and measures directed towards mitigating and adapting to climate change,

and also to just transition policies as workers.”

Historically, European imperialism triggered

the current environmental crisis in

the colonies by means of appropriating and transforming

sustainable ecosystems across the globe in pursuit of

high-yield production, for the sake of the accumulation of wealth in the imperial centers.

As a consequence of this exploitation of colonized regions,

their landscapes deteriorated and

the indigenous people were deprived of their traditional livelihoods.

In his book on the European invasion of the Americas,

Andrew Sluyter observes that

“colonization transformed landscapes on a scale and to

a degree unprecedented since retreat of the continental ice sheets.

The European invasion rejoined two ecosystems that had for the most part been

diverging since the Pangaean supercontinent fragmented some 200 million years previous.”

When the first explorers arrived,

they perceived the indigenous cultures as uncivilized.

Based on this judgment,

it was determined that the local people did not

efficiently extract the resources afforded by nature,

and therefore were undeserving of the places’ property rights.

Assisted by military power and religious legitimation,

the colonizers occupied the foreign lands.

Investors arrived from overseas and destroyed land that had

traditionally been held sacred, to make room for their plantations,

cattle farms, and mines.

Within a short period of time,

formerly prosperous landscapes were exhausted and turned into

wasteland, while the local people were pushed into poverty,

if not entirely wiped out or driven away and scattered.

Upon this, a discourse on endangerment and loss emerged in

the developed, resource-extracting countries, which bemoaned

the disappearance of the indigenous cultures and ecologies, despite

the fact that their own pressure on these ancient worlds continued.

The affective double bind linking cultural superiority claims to feelings of

loss and guilt was called “imperialist nostalgia” by anthropologist Renato Rosaldo:

“Imperialist nostalgia thus revolves around

a paradox: a person kills someone and then mourns his or her victim.

In more attenuated form,

someone deliberately alters a form of life and then regrets that

things have not remained as they were prior to his or her intervention.

At one more remove,

people destroy their environment and then worship nature.”

Colonized Asian landscapes underwent

similarly radical transformations as the American and Australian colonies.

A telling example is provided by the palm oil industry’s rainforest destruction on Borneo.

Hong Kong is a kind of exception, as the scarce indigenous population was

not dispossessed, but moderately profited from the colonial economic development.

The majority of Chinese immigrants to Hong Kong suffered severe poverty, though.

After the first Opium War,

Hong Kong was handed over to the British colonizers by a defeated Qing Empire in 1842.

Initially, the scattered settlements of farming and fishing villages in Hong Kong

proper and the surrounding islands were considered a very poor deal by the British Crown.

The indigenous population numbered less than 7,500 people in the 19th century.

It mainly consisted of southern Chinese immigrants who had

fled war and famine during the Mongol and earlier periods.

During the 1850s and early 60s, however, the Taiping rebellion,

as well as floods and droughts,

already brought large numbers of mainland Chinese refugees

to the now rapidly developing Crown colony.

The ensuing economic miracle turned Hong Kong into

a hypermodern global trade hub and

cosmopolitan jewel on the British Crown in the 20th century.

This economic success story is well known,

but the place’s environmental transformations have

only recently begun to attract academic attention.

In the case of literature,

the turn can be detected several decades earlier.

Beginning from the late 1970s, if not earlier,

local authors reflected on the way of life in

this multicultural urban environment with its blurred power structures and booming economy,

while at the same time contemplating the fate of its natural environment.

Dung Kai-cheung, Leung Ping-kwan,

and Xi Xi, for example,

poetically combined feelings of transience and

uncertainty with records of destroyed neighborhoods,

vanishing landscapes, and endangered species.

As they explore the changing meanings of the place,

their literary works intersect issues of postcolonial identity,

culture, community, and ecology.

Woman writer, Shih Shu-ch’ing,

too, focused on this intersection.

She wrote an epic Hong Kong trilogy with

a teenage immigrant girl as the main protagonist.

An innocent victim with no formal education,

the girl painfully learns to defend and assert

herself until she becomes a highly successful real estate developer.

In between, there is her abduction and sale to a Hong Kong brothel by a gang of bandits,

her rise as a courtesan, and support of her start-up business from an expat admirer.

What is particularly interesting about Shih’s three-partite family saga, is

the carefully designed intersection of human and natural histories, wherein some of

the place’s endemic plants and animal species, such as the Jezebel butterfly and

the Hong Kong Bauhinia tree, function as symbolic markers

of a local patchwork identity beyond cultural politics.

Postcolonial narratives frequently borrow aspects of identity, place attachment,

conviviality, and integration from

widely known pre-modern stories, and weave them into

their modern tales loss, drifting, and disintegration.

The ongoing popularity of these tropes in postcolonial literature hints

at the fact that today’s corporate globalism exploits

postcolonial communities in ways that reproduce

the dismantled colonial power’s approach, albeit in a new legal and political framework.

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