Beyond the National Allegory: Affect, Ecosickness, and the Posthuman Condition in Han Song’s Subway

AbstractIn the global pandemic era, it becomes more worthwhile than ever for us to consider humanity as a community whose destiny is shared regardless of planetary inequality. Science fiction provides a good vehicle to speculate on the future, especially in the thought experiments regarding high technologization, setbacks of globalization, and ecological crises. This paper explores Han Song’s Subway (Ditie) to understand what challenges high modernization—especially technologization and global capitalism—poses to human and nonhuman existence. The collection of short stories overarches its temporal setting from the Anthropocene to a post-Anthropocene era, where the planet is destroyed by an apocalypse. This article approaches Han Song’s representation of cybernetic (post)human existence, a situation generated when human embodied experience is subjugated under technological manipulation. Drawing on concepts from new materialist ecocriticism such as ecosickness, it argues that Han Song’s subway stories represent the dual crises of the posthuman era—both affective and ecological. These stories express deep concern about the potential apocalyptic impact of techno-utopianism, exploitative expansion of global capitalism, and historical teleology. AcknowledgmentAn earlier version of this paper has been published under the title “Envisioning Posthuman Existence in Han Song’s Subway (2010)” with Limina, A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, in 2020.Notes1 Nathaniel, “Han Song,” 4.2 Wu, “A Very Brief History of Chinese Science Fiction,” 51.3 Han, “The Last Subway,” Pathlight.4 Excerpts of “Subway Alarm” has been translated by Rachel Faith.5 Li, “On Han Song’s Fiction,” 114–15.6 Song, “Representations of the Invisible,” 550.7 Han, Subway, 203–94.8 Li, “Eerie Parables and Prophecies,” 28–32.9 “Obsession with China” is a concept C. T. Hsia coins to critique modern Chinese literature in that the writers share “a moral burden” to identify all these issues represented as solely Chinese problems. With this concept, C. T. Hsia wants to call for an awareness of the shared human conditions that Chinese literature needs to tackle. See Hsai, “Obsession with China,” 533–54.10 Song, “Seeing the Void in Everything,” 153–58.11 Ihab Hassan, “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?,” The Georgia Review 31, no. 4 (1977): 830–50.12 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 1–42.13 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 46, 51.14 Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, 15.15 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 57.16 Hayles, How We Become Posthuman, 5.17 Clough, “Introduction,” 2.18 Despite the Anthropocentric color in the word “nature” and “environment,” I have to use the concepts when these words covey the meanings straightforwardly.19 Houser, Ecosickness, 11.20 Alaimo, Bodily Natures.21 Houser, Ecosickness, 7–11.22 Houser, “Affective Turn,” 16.23 Wildea and Jia, “China’s Subway Building Binge.”24 “The deepest agony of China, the giant fissure in her heart, her struggle against absurdity, and the uncertainty of the future after she woke up and flourished, and her hidden crisis, its being sieged by the world, and the unsettling, wandering souls of her sons and daughters.” Han, “Preface,” in Subway, 12.25 For example, Dianshizhai Pictorial (Dianshizhai huabao 點石齋畫報), one of the most popular magazines in late ninetieth century China, pictured the railways as monstrous forces that evoke evil spirits. See Li Siyi, Railway Modernity, chapter 2.26 Han, Subway, 17.27 Ibid., 19.28 Ibid., 19.29 Song, “Seeing the Void in Everything,” 153–58.30 “I saw an abyss in heaven. In everything I saw nothingness; in hopelessness I found salvation” (yu tianshang kanjian shenyuan. Yu yiqie yanzhong kanjian wusuoyou; yu wusuo xiwang Zhong dejiu 於天上看見深淵。於一切眼中看見無所有；於無所希望中得救。) Lu Xun Wild Grass, 44. (I borrowed the translation from the English edition with modifications.)31 Han, Subway, 63–64. The original text is in Chinese, translation is mine.32 Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future, 82–83.33 Han, Subway, 280. Translation mine.34 Ibid., 287.35 Lu Xun, “Regret for the Past”: (sizhou shi guangda de kongxu, haiyou si de jijing. Siyu wu’ai de renmen de yanqian de hei’an, wo fangfo yiyi kanjian, hai tingdedao yiqie kumen he juewang de zhengzha de shengyin. 四圍是廣大的空虛, 還有死的寂靜。死於無愛的人們的眼前的黑暗, 我彷佛一一看見, 還聽得一切苦悶和絕望的掙扎的聲音). Accessed June 20, 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1925/10/21.htm.36 This excerpt has been translated by Song Mingwei in “Representations of the Invisible,” and I stick to Song’s translation, 555. For the original Chinese text, see Han, Subway, 93–94. The translation in this article are mine unless specified.37 Song, 555.38 Han, Subway, 107.39 Han, “Chinese Science Fiction,” 20.40 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 32.41 Merchant, “The Death of Nature,” 37.42 Song, “Representations of the Invisible,” 555.43 According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the air pollution is much more series in Asia than most other regions in the world. “92% of Asia and the Pacific’s population—about 4 billion people—are exposed to levels of air pollution that pose a significant risk to their health.” United Nations Environment Programme Climate and Clean Air Coalition, “Air pollution measures for Asia and the Pacific,” Accessed on November 27, 2021. https://www.ccacoalition.org/en/content/air-pollution-measures-asia-and-pacific.44 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 19.45 Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 7.46 See Xu, “From the quotidian subway to the train of human destiny.”47 Han, Subway, 233.48 In Red Ocean, the mutated human descendants live in a red ocean after a nuclear disaster that eliminated the life on the surface of the Earth. See Han Song Red Ocean.49 Han, Subway, 292.50 Ibid., 291.51 Ibid., 293.52 Wang, “Spatio-Temporal Myth in Han Song’s Science Fiction,” 27.53 Song, “Representations of the Invisible,” 157.54 Kang, “How to Critique Technological Alienation,” 48–80.55 “Trapped in the System” comes from a widely discussed article entitled “The takeaway riders trapped in the system” (“Waimai qishou, kunzai xitongli” 外賣騎手, 困在系統裡) by People (Renwu人物) magazine in 2020. It reveals the dehumanizing nature of technological acceleration—as China’s food delivery industry employs algorithmic optimization to shrink delivery time and gain customs, the safety of the takeaway riders is readily ignored.Additional informationNotes on contributorsFan NiFan Ni is an early-career researcher and lecturer at East China University of Political Science and Law based in Shanghai. She holds a master’s degree in English literature at Zhejiang University and a PhD degree in Chinese and Comparative literature at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests include ecocritical studies, contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature, contemporary Chinese science fiction, comparative and world literature, affect theory, and posthumanism. Her recent article “National Extinction: Australia and Narratives of Extinction” (coauthored with Tony Hughes-d’Aeth) came out in 2021 in Connected Civilizations: A Transcultural Approach to China and Australia.