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

Abstract

Abstract 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.