2024
Weixian Pan
- Assistant Professor
- Queen's University
![Picture of Weixian Pan](https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/7FF89D0C-42ED-EE11-A203-0022481C879C.jpg)
Abstract
This ongoing book project examines the crucial role of visuality in imagining and shaping China’s frontier environments and their political promises. The project approaches the term “frontier” not as a ready-made geographical and ecological border space, but reframes it as a cultural, political, and above all, visual logic of territory-making that has mutated from the mid-twentieth century to today. Drawing on a wide range of textual records, including geo-survey reports, news stories, construction blueprints, popular science readers, and visual materials—fiction and non-fiction films, tv documentaries, digital video, and satellite images—the book argues that China’s political aspirations are actualized through and, at times, challenged by “frontier vision.”