Earthbound Mediation: Geological Entanglements in Sinophone Extractive Zones

Abstract

“Earthbound Mediation: Geological Entanglements in Sinophone Extractive Zones” studies the sites of fossil fuel and mineral extraction, where geology complexly entwines with humanity as well as methods of humanistic inquiry. Across four zones of extraction from hinterland China to archipelagic Taiwan, from late imperial days to the age of transnational corporations, this project brings together an assortment of materials—film and photography, literature and oral history, technical manuals and archaeological projects—that puts our Age of Extraction into media cultural perspective. In each extractive zone, I identify an aesthetic form married to a sociopolitical norm—family melodrama to the feudal society in Zigong, also known as the Chinese city of salt; socialist realism to Mao’s utopic visions experimented in the oil fields of Daqing; Taiwan New Cinema to the serial colonial regimes dictating coal-mining activities in Taiwan; and science fiction to late capitalism, through whose logic of displacement e-waste was dumped in masses in Guiyu, China as well as by the Erren River in Taiwan. I fold my interrogation of these aesthetic and political forms into a larger conceptual framework, which turns the arts of representation into what I call “earthbound techniques.” I argue that approaching these sites requires skills of binding, prospecting, folding, and reading, whose technical processes orient us toward a fundamental intimacy—a “geointimacy”—we share with geomatter.

Each of the chapters revolves around a central earthbound technique. Chapter 1 lands in the saltyards in wartime Zigong, where binding figures as an essential skill to manually assemble the extractive infrastructure, to forge film spectators into a patriotic collective in times of national upheaval, and to tether women—especially mothers—to earthbound labor and earth guardianship. Chapter 2 looks into the building of the Daqing Oil Field in socialist China. I orient the arguments around prospecting as a geophysical technique, a political heuristic, and a visual aesthetic to construe oil extraction as a site of eventful mediation that hosts a myriad of geo-political encounters. Shifting to the coal village in Houtong, Taiwan, Chapter 3 focuses on folding as an operation that brings together geological, respiratory, psychic, and religious events—an earthly riff on the Heideggerian fourfold—in the subterranean mine, which further suggests new approaches to studying the cinematic movement of Taiwan New Cinema. Foregrounding the method of close reading, Chapter 4 ponders what happens when the presentist mindset of environmental activism encounters the dogged insistence to close read a text or a piece of wretched land. Juxtaposing a poem, a science fiction novel, and an archaeological project about e-waste pollution, I reengage the reading debate among literary scholars, and evaluate the stakes of critique in the age of global ecological crisis.