Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong's Women Migrant Workers(Ecocritical Theory and Practice)

Migrant Ecologies investigates the ways in which Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry exposes the entanglements of migrant ecologies embedded within local and global networks of capital and labor. The author contends that women migrant workers in particular, as portrayed in Zheng’s poems, are the visible manifestation of the interconnections between the so-called “factories of the world” and slum villages-in-the-city, between urban development and rural decline, and between the local environmental degradation and the global market. By adopting an ecological approach to Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers in China, the author explores what Donna Haraway calls “webbed ecologies” (49). The concept of “ecologies” serves to enhance not only the layered, complex interconnections underlying women migrant workers’ plight and environmental degradation in China, but also the emergence and transformation of migrant spaces, subjects, activism, and networks resulting in part from globalization.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Migrant Ecologies as a Site of Critical Inquiry Chapter 1: Vignettes of Material Memoirs: Toxic Environment and Women Migrant Workers’ Industrial Diseases Chapter 2: “Carceral Capitalism”: Factory Cities and Villages-in-the-City Chapter 3: The Other Scene of Globalization: Hollow Villages and Migrant Workers’ Families Conclusion: A Politics of Migrant Ecologies Bibliography Index About the Author and Translator

About the Author :
Zheng Xiaoqiong, a critically acclaimed contemporary poet in China, has published twelve collections of poetry. Zhou Xiaojing is professor of English at University of the Pacific. She is the author of Cities of Others: Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature and The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry.

Review :
In Migrant Ecologies, Zhou Xiaojing articulates the hidden intricacies and intimacies of gendered labor, mass migration, ecological devastation, rural decline, and worker resistance in China through her brilliant analysis and translations of Zheng Xioaquion’s poetry. This book makes an invaluable contribution to global ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and migration studies. Migrant Ecologies represents an imaginative, innovative and sophisticated way of understanding social change in contemporary China. Through the prism of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s intimate yet powerful poems, Zhou demonstrates both the human and planetary consequences of social inequality, industrialization and environmental degradation. China’s migrant worker poetry raises fundamental questions about literature and social justice, and Zheng Xiaoqiong crucially brings gender into the equation. Grim yet hopeful, Migrant Ecologies draws on Zheng's poetry for charting the entanglements of global capitalism, migration, environmental destruction, and inequality. When Zheng Xiaoqiong's poetry first appeared in print, it was a seismic event. Only a voice as brutally beautiful as her's could have opened a space large enough in her readers hearts to take in the full vulnerable resilience of China's migrant workers. Once caught in the crossweave of her unflinching witness and the buoyant even sublimity lyricsim, the Chinese poetry world cracked open and has never been put back together again. We have been waiting for a scholar like Zhou Xiaojing to tell this story. And only one as attentive to poetic details as the larger picture they reveal could have done so. Be prepared, and do not delay. Reading this book is as urgent as it is unforgettable. Migrant Ecologies is Zhou Xiaojing's excellent, acute, and moving translation of the poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong, a contemporary Chinese woman migrant worker, poet, and activist. Zhou's Introduction offers eloquent and rigorous critiques of the complex relationships between the exploitation of the gendered labor of Chinese migrant women workers, the health risks in toxic working environment, sexual trafficking, poverty in the large slums in Southern Chinese cities, the contemporary Chinese industrialization, urbanization, environmental degradation, and global capitalism. Zhou advocates for the formation of the Chinese and Third World working class migrant women workers' agency and resistance against environmental and social injustice. This is an important and unique contribution to the literature and scholarship on global eco-feminist ecology and activism.