Environmental Justice through Nostalgia and Solastalgia: Literary Representations of Ethnic Minority Children in Rural China

As climate change is now a global imperative that interlocks with socio-economic shifts related to the environment, ecocriticism has come to play a newly important role in children's literature. China has been reconfigured by unprecedented social and economic transformation in past decades, yet at the cost of various environmental justice issues that largely impact underrepresented children in rural regions and ethnic minority communities. Many minority communities in China have borne disproportionate consequences of climate change and have endured the loss of indigenous culture due to the uneven impacts of development. This paper analyses a range of narratives about minority youth and children in China – in particular, Gerelchimeg Blackcrane's Ju Han [ The Ewenki Moose] (2015) and Li Ruijun's River Road (2014) – to draw attention to the entanglement of environmental justice and affective ecocriticism in children's literature. Both texts portray how ecological affect unfolds in children's interactions with natural environments and with authentic, fading traditions of cultural values in rural minority communities. Focusing on the ecological nostalgia and solastalgia manifested in the aforementioned literary works, this analysis foregrounds said affect as a catalyst for an ecological agency that helps construct the reader's awareness of ontological, epistemological, and political dimensions of life in an era that has been transformed by environmental catastrophes. Reading the decline of nature and traditional cultures as a consequence of an encroachment of capitalist industrialisation, this paper also aims to shed light on the theoretical potential of affect theory in reading children's literature.