This week I’m revising the introduction to a book project contracted with Routledge Press. A reviewer pointed us to some other research to include in our literature review, so my goal today was to look at a couple of pieces from urban sociologist Christopher Schliephake. One chapter in his Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture, “The More-than-Human City: Material Agents, Cyborgs, and the Invasion of Alien Species” connects somewhat with our own work, Ecocinema in the City. According to Schliephake, films such as Metropolis (1927) to The Host (2006) and District 9 (2009) “question the anthropocentric view of the urban as a human habitat, re-figuring it as a space of hybridity and trans-corporeality” (xiv).
In his Ecozon journal, “From Green to Brown Landscapes—and Back Again,” Schliephake focuses more explicitly on the lessons of urban ecology learned from analyzing ecocinema. By reading the South Korean film Cast Away on the Moon through an ecocritical lens, he attempts to bring industrial brown and exurban green “in conversation with one another” (“From Green to Brown Landscapes”). Because Schliephake stresses interdependence between human and nonhuman nature, his approach aligns well with our own.
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