In Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan, Robin Visser invites readers to decolonize their understanding of Chinese and Taiwan literatures by reimagining their relationships to the legacies and continuing realities of colonialism, imperialism, and environmental degradation. She engages in the relational study of literatures composed by Han-ethnic and regionally Indigenous writers to demonstrate how imagined and practiced relationships between humans, nonhuman animals, and the diverse ecologies of China and Taiwan work to facilitate, resist, and/or exceed the hegemony of extractive capitalist practices. Taking “borders as a method” (1), she reveals the relational construction of such boundaries in both the surveyed works and related academic scholarship, drawing on ideas from Indigenous and ethnic studies, ecocriticism, and philosophy to build her argument. Overall, the book advances a critique of imperialist, “Hanspace cosmologies” that would appropriate, eliminate, or otherwise obscure Indigenous lifeways, which she suggests hold the keys to a sustainable...
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