Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora
What can migrant ecologies teach us about collective planetary futures? In Planetarity from Below, Emily Yu Zong argues that modern freedom has framed migration in anthropocentric terms, neglecting that migration is also an ecological process. Analyzing a diverse body of migration literature across Australia, North America, and China, she explores how these works unlearn modern capitalist systems of property, individualism, and freedom while imagining collaborative and ecological survival from the margins.

Through short stories, memoirs, speculative fiction, poetry, and documentary films, Zong unpacks a decolonial migrant ecopoetics, revealing a pluralist method of worldmaking—from Australia’s oceanic refugee camps, Indigenous Canadian land, and Chinese migrant worker sweatshops, to climate futures. These migrant ecologies imagine freedom “from below” not simply as individual survival or assimilation but as an unruly and contingent process of shared creativity with animals, waters, minerals, waste, and technology.

Shifting environmental ethics from individual morality to a political ecology of sustaining life in precarity, Zong introduces decolonial knowledges, imaginations, and praxes that help us expand justice and freedom beyond the human, asking how borderland subjectivities can open new possibilities for multispecies flourishing.
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Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora
What can migrant ecologies teach us about collective planetary futures? In Planetarity from Below, Emily Yu Zong argues that modern freedom has framed migration in anthropocentric terms, neglecting that migration is also an ecological process. Analyzing a diverse body of migration literature across Australia, North America, and China, she explores how these works unlearn modern capitalist systems of property, individualism, and freedom while imagining collaborative and ecological survival from the margins.

Through short stories, memoirs, speculative fiction, poetry, and documentary films, Zong unpacks a decolonial migrant ecopoetics, revealing a pluralist method of worldmaking—from Australia’s oceanic refugee camps, Indigenous Canadian land, and Chinese migrant worker sweatshops, to climate futures. These migrant ecologies imagine freedom “from below” not simply as individual survival or assimilation but as an unruly and contingent process of shared creativity with animals, waters, minerals, waste, and technology.

Shifting environmental ethics from individual morality to a political ecology of sustaining life in precarity, Zong introduces decolonial knowledges, imaginations, and praxes that help us expand justice and freedom beyond the human, asking how borderland subjectivities can open new possibilities for multispecies flourishing.
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Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora

Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora

by Emily Yu Zong
Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora

Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora

by Emily Yu Zong

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Overview

What can migrant ecologies teach us about collective planetary futures? In Planetarity from Below, Emily Yu Zong argues that modern freedom has framed migration in anthropocentric terms, neglecting that migration is also an ecological process. Analyzing a diverse body of migration literature across Australia, North America, and China, she explores how these works unlearn modern capitalist systems of property, individualism, and freedom while imagining collaborative and ecological survival from the margins.

Through short stories, memoirs, speculative fiction, poetry, and documentary films, Zong unpacks a decolonial migrant ecopoetics, revealing a pluralist method of worldmaking—from Australia’s oceanic refugee camps, Indigenous Canadian land, and Chinese migrant worker sweatshops, to climate futures. These migrant ecologies imagine freedom “from below” not simply as individual survival or assimilation but as an unruly and contingent process of shared creativity with animals, waters, minerals, waste, and technology.

Shifting environmental ethics from individual morality to a political ecology of sustaining life in precarity, Zong introduces decolonial knowledges, imaginations, and praxes that help us expand justice and freedom beyond the human, asking how borderland subjectivities can open new possibilities for multispecies flourishing.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780472057818
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Publication date: 01/19/2026
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Emily Yu Zong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration
Part I. Diasporic Unsettler Poetics
1. Unsettling Possession: Diasporic Ecologies and Ethics of Wonder 
2. Decolonizing Waters: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and the Aqueous Commons 
Part II. Thick mobility
3. Refugee Thick Mobility: More-than-Human Emergence at Oceanic Borders
4. Climate Migration, Carbon Specters, and Planetarity from Below 
5. Global Excess, Planetary Deviance: Migrant Workers, Waste, and the Geo-Cyborg 
Epilogue: “Sowing Seeds within the Cracks”: Diaspora as a Decolonial Praxis 
Bibliography
Index
 

What People are Saying About This

Scott Slovic

"Planetarity from Below beautifully counteracts the typical marginalization of migrants as powerless victims and presents these communities of people—and the very process of movement—as empowered, valuable contributors to solving our collective ecological crisis in the late Anthropocene."

Xiaojing Zhou

"Planetarity from Below broadens the topic, approach, and conceptual framework of ecocriticism by shifting the critical gaze to the often neglected or marginalized migrant/refugee figure, and by connecting ecocriticism to a broader range of issues and critical discourses in various fields."

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