Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora
Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora
by Emily Yu Zong
University of Michigan Press, 2026
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-0-472-07781-6
Paper: 978-0-472-05781-8
eISBN: 978-0-472-90542-3 (OA)
About the Book
What can migrant ecologies teach us about collective planetary futures? In Planetarity from Below, Emily Yu Zong argues that modern freedom has framed migration in anthropocentric terms, neglecting that migration is also an ecological process. Analyzing a diverse body of migration literature across Australia, North America, and China, she explores how these works unlearn modern capitalist systems of property, individualism, and freedom while imagining collaborative and ecological survival from the margins.
Through short stories, memoirs, speculative fiction, poetry, and documentary films, Zong unpacks a decolonial migrant ecopoetics, revealing a pluralist method of worldmaking—from Australia’s oceanic refugee camps, Indigenous Canadian land, and Chinese migrant worker sweatshops, to climate futures. These migrant ecologies imagine freedom “from below” not simply as individual survival or assimilation but as an unruly and contingent process of shared creativity with animals, waters, minerals, waste, and technology.
Shifting environmental ethics from individual morality to a political ecology of sustaining life in precarity, Zong introduces decolonial knowledges, imaginations, and praxes that help us expand justice and freedom beyond the human, asking how borderland subjectivities can open new possibilities for multispecies flourishing.
Through short stories, memoirs, speculative fiction, poetry, and documentary films, Zong unpacks a decolonial migrant ecopoetics, revealing a pluralist method of worldmaking—from Australia’s oceanic refugee camps, Indigenous Canadian land, and Chinese migrant worker sweatshops, to climate futures. These migrant ecologies imagine freedom “from below” not simply as individual survival or assimilation but as an unruly and contingent process of shared creativity with animals, waters, minerals, waste, and technology.
Shifting environmental ethics from individual morality to a political ecology of sustaining life in precarity, Zong introduces decolonial knowledges, imaginations, and praxes that help us expand justice and freedom beyond the human, asking how borderland subjectivities can open new possibilities for multispecies flourishing.
About the Author
Emily Yu Zong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Reviews
"Planetarity from Below beautifully counteracts the typical marginalization of migrants as powerless victims and presents these communities of people—and the very process of movement—as empowered, valuable contributors to solving our collective ecological crisis in the late Anthropocene."— Scott Slovic, Oregon Research Institute
“Through lucid literary analyses, this book rejects the dubious alliances between the colonial nation state and modern environmentalism, and instead bears witness to a trans-species, earthly decolonial movement from below. Zong’s rich examples of migrant ecological knowledge testify to the power of collaborative survival.”— Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
"Planetarity from Below broadens the topic, approach, and conceptual framework of ecocriticism by shifting the critical gaze to the often neglected or marginalized migrant/refugee figure, and by connecting ecocriticism to a broader range of issues and critical discourses in various fields."— Xiaojing Zhou, University of the Pacific
"Reading across an impressive range of migrant and diasporic writing and film from Australia, Canada, and China, Planetarity from Below fleshes out the ethical and relational potentialities of migrant ecologies. Zong’s brilliant analysis of diasporic and migrant entanglements with situated, more-than-human worlds draws provocative new connections between the fields of critical migration studies, environmental humanities, and critical ethnic studies."— Hsuan L. Hsu, University of California, Davis
Tags
Colonies in literature, Australian & Oceanian, Below, Emigration and immigration in literature, Immigrants in literature, Indigenous, Asian, Literary Criticism
Open Access Information
License: CC BY-NC
Loading...