TY - JOUR
T1 - Plant performance
T2 - war, ethnicity, and the Japanese garden in patricia grace’s chappy
AU - Liang, Iping
N1 - Funding Information:
Iping Liang is professor of English and American Studies at National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. She publishes in the areas of Archipelagic American Studies, Critical Plant Studies, Native American Literature, and Asian American Literature in both English and Chinese including Mushroom Clouds: Ecocritical Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia (Routledge 2021); I’m Migrant: New Perspective on Overseas Chinese Studies (NTNU 2018); Asia/Americas: Asian American Literature in Taiwan (Bookman 2013), and Ghost Dances: Toward a Native American Gothic (Bookman 2006). She is currently the president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Taiwan (ASLE-Taiwan, 2017-21). She also serves on the Editorial Board of Translocal Chinese: East Asian Perspectives (2018-24) and on the Advisory Board of the International Society for the Studies of Chinese Overseas (2019-22). With Brian Roberts, Hester Blum, and Mary Eyring, she co-edited a special issue, “Archipelagos, Oceans, and American Visuality,” for the Journal of Transnational American Studies (UC Santa Barbara, 2019). Her current research project, funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan), investigates the plant narratives in the Asia-Pacific during the Cold War era. E-mail: lip@ntnu.edu.tw
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Tamkang University. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/12
Y1 - 2020/12
N2 - This essay investigates the representation of the Japanese garden as a site of “plant performance” in New Zealand writer Patricia Grace’s Chappy (2015). By drawing on critical plant studies publications by Patricia Vieira et al., John Ryan, Alan Read, Brendan Doody et al., and others, I examine both the material and metaphor of the Japanese garden in Grace’s novel. Planted in New Zealand by Chappy, the garden represents a human-made and ethnic landscape, bearing a specific politicized aesthetics and coding of Japan and embodying an “ecological poesies”—a performance site that in the words of Vieira et al., is one of “bearing seeds, irrupting in flowers, sprouting rhizomes, uncoiling leaves, attracting pollinators, garnering human attention, and mobilizing transnational networks” (viii). Focusing on the ethnic and botanical “performance” of the Japanese garden in Chappy according to the given critical perspectives, I explore the connection between the garden and other content that addresses war, ethnicity, and transvegetal interconnectedness. I argue that the Japanese garden in Grace’s novel creates and calls for a “poetics of inclusion” that centers on peace and interconnect-edness rather than war and exclusion.
AB - This essay investigates the representation of the Japanese garden as a site of “plant performance” in New Zealand writer Patricia Grace’s Chappy (2015). By drawing on critical plant studies publications by Patricia Vieira et al., John Ryan, Alan Read, Brendan Doody et al., and others, I examine both the material and metaphor of the Japanese garden in Grace’s novel. Planted in New Zealand by Chappy, the garden represents a human-made and ethnic landscape, bearing a specific politicized aesthetics and coding of Japan and embodying an “ecological poesies”—a performance site that in the words of Vieira et al., is one of “bearing seeds, irrupting in flowers, sprouting rhizomes, uncoiling leaves, attracting pollinators, garnering human attention, and mobilizing transnational networks” (viii). Focusing on the ethnic and botanical “performance” of the Japanese garden in Chappy according to the given critical perspectives, I explore the connection between the garden and other content that addresses war, ethnicity, and transvegetal interconnectedness. I argue that the Japanese garden in Grace’s novel creates and calls for a “poetics of inclusion” that centers on peace and interconnect-edness rather than war and exclusion.
KW - Chappy
KW - Critical plant studies
KW - Ethnicity
KW - Maori
KW - Patricia Grace
KW - Plant performance
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85115359643&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85115359643&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.6184/TKR.202012_51(1).0001
DO - 10.6184/TKR.202012_51(1).0001
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85115359643
SN - 0049-2949
VL - 51
SP - 3
EP - 25
JO - Tamkang Review
JF - Tamkang Review
IS - 1
ER -