Between Animal and Machine: Ecologizing Modernisms in Wartime China, 1931-1945

Abstract

How do we envision connections with human and nonhuman others in a time of destruction and division? This dissertation tackles the question in the context of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and its prelude by examining the cultural products of the time: from fiction to films, from popular science magazines to memoirs by engineers and scientists. These materials demonstrate how Chinese and international writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals in wartime China repositioned the human condition in relation to nonhuman figures. In dialogue with existing scholarship that emphasizes human factors, such as ideological divisions in wartime cultural production, I argue that ecological imaginations evoked by nonhuman figures also significantly shaped the landscape of twentieth-century Chinese literature and media. This dissertation explores the roles played by a series of nonhuman figures in more-than-human wartime ecologies, from the frontlines to the hinterland. The first chapter examines the figure of the poison gas in prewar popular science media and its environmental and affective implications. The second chapter delves into mimeograph printing techniques and animal perspectives adopted by the leftist soldier writer Qiu Dongping. The third chapter reconstructs the poetics of infrastructure emerging from the tortuous history of the Burma Road, which is intertwined with the histories of the tropical environment and media technology. The fourth chapter reflects on the promises and perils of posthuman kinship in a colonial world order by bringing the Japanese biologist-writer Nishimura Makoto into dialogue with the Chinese writer Lu Xun, via the figures of a pigeon and a robot. Finally, the epilogue offers a glimpse of the lasting entanglement between wartime discourses and ecological imaginations, as manifested by the figure of the elephant from the battlefield in socialist documentary cinema and contemporary Sinophone fiction. In these case studies, I identify moments of “precarious connections” between human and nonhuman entities, which are generated by and contributing to wartime states of emergency, contingencies, and a shared sense of precarity. Beyond the historical scope of this dissertation, these precarious connections shed lights on how we imagine relational responsibilities for human and nonhuman others in the hot and cold wars at the present.