At Home in the World: Wandering Earth, Environmentalism, and Reimagined Homelands

Based on a 2000 novella by Cixin Liu with the same title, Frant Gwo’s 2019 film Wandering Earth has been celebrated as China’s first big-budget science fiction film. As a Chinese film with a global theme that simultaneously targets both a domestic and an international audience, accordingly, the work invites a reflection on the relationship between the local and the global—on how we understand the concept of home, and what it might mean to be home in the world. This essay, accordingly, examines three intersecting ways in which Wandering Earth (both the film and the original novella) explores the relationship between home and the world, including the status of the Earth as an ecological system, the planet’s status as a lived environment, as well as a set of contemporary geopolitical discourses about China’s shifting position within the contemporary world order, and particularly its relationship to the Global South.

For the Love of Science

In Carmen, the narrator is a French historian who tells us his adventures in Spain and his meeting the famous bandit José and his lover, Carmen. The novella published in 1845 consisted of three chapters. In the last chapter, which is the basis of the opera’s plot, José himself recounts his relationship with Carmen and her death. In 1847, two years after the first publication of Carmen, Mérimée adds a fourth chapter to the original novella. This fourth chapter presents itself as a study of Romany, the language of the Roma, then called Gypsies. This fourth chapter, under the guise of being a scientific study of Romany, underscores the misogyny and racism already apparent in the earlier chapters.

Humanities Fiction: Translation and ‘Transplanetarity’ in Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival

One of the more interesting science fiction movies of recent years, at least to Humanities academics, is Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 alien-invasion movie, Arrival. It is a film which not only features a Professor of Linguistics as its heroine, but the plot of which is organised around the critical global importance of a multi-million dollar translation project. This essay compares the film with the original novella upon which it was based – Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998) – to examine the role translation plays in both, with the aim of placing this in the context of the crisis in the Humanities which has marked universities over the last few years, and can be linked to a more general crisis in liberal values. While founded upon a time-honoured science fiction scenario the movie also clearly articulates the sense of global peril which is typical of much of the cultural production of our current times, manifested in fears about ecological catastrophe, terrorist attacks, and the anthropocene, etc. Another of its crisis-points is also ‘very 2016’: its ability to use science fiction tropes to express an anxiety about how liberal values are in danger of being overtaken by a self-interested, forceful, intolerant kind of politics. Arrival is as much a work of ‘hu-fi’ as it is ‘sci-fi’, that is, ‘Humanities fiction’, a film which uses Chiang’s original novella to convey a message about the restorative potential of ‘Humanities values’ in the face of a new global threat.

Breaths, Falls, and Eddies in All This Can Happen: A Dialogue

Dancefilm muddles the paradigms that would position film as an order of production controlling all cinematic motion (including camera movement, film speed, editing etc.), and dance as motion, liberated and encompassing any-movement-whatever. David Hinton and Siobhan Davies’ experimental film, <em>All This Can Happen</em> (2013), draws text, image, and edit together via a poetics that is of the order of the choreographic. In a dialogue that echoes the collaborative spirit of the film, Erin Brannigan and Cleo Mees explore the corporeal and choreographic sensibilites at work in <em>All This Can Happen</em>, recognizing dynamics of breath and weight in various aspects of the film’s composition, including the movements of the bodies on screen, the qualities of the edit, and the text of Robert Walser’s original novella (on which the film is based). In exploring these corporeal-cinematic qualities, the authors work across and soften the dance-film binary described above.