Migrant Ecologies

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.

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.

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.