Event Details - Between the World Ship and the Spaceship: Planetarianism, Hollywood, Nationalism, and the Iceberg-Shaped Story of The Wandering Earth/流浪地球 (2019)

Turn to the Planet and the Turn of the Planet

---- The Paradoxical View of Human Totality in The Wandering Earth (2019)

 Wang, Zhuoyi

Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures

Hamilton College

 Released in 2019, The Wandering Earth (dir. Frant Gwo) achieved a breakthrough for Chinese sci-fi films. Not only did the film reap a worldwide box office bonanza, but it generated heated discussions and debates on its political message and artistic merit in China. This talk will analyze how this film, in its imagination of a total environmental disaster and a global unity fighting for survival of humanity and the earth, departs from the Hollywood sci-fi formula of individual saviors toward the ideal of planetarianism. It will also point out the many textual cracks left in the film by the links and tensions between Hollywood and Chinese cinemas, commercial interests and political censorship, individualism and collectivism, as well as globalism and nationalism. Due to these cracks, the film’s salutary turn to planetarianism is nonetheless filled with paradoxical understanding of the ecological relationships among individuals, human totality, and the homeland earth.

Zhuoyi Wang received his doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Washington at Seattle. He is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Hamilton College. His research and teaching interest is in comparative study of Chinese-language and Hollywood cinemas. He has published in such journals as Chinese Literature Today, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Literature and Art Studies (Wenyi yanjiu), Journal of Beijing Film Academy (Beijing dianying xueyuan xuebao), and China Review International. He is the author of Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951-1979 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the co-editor of Maoist Laughter (with Ping Zhu and Jason McGrath, Hong Kong University Press, 2019).