Whose World? Whose World Literature? Looking for Climate Fiction in China

That the Anthropocene needs a world literature seems axiomatic. This,however, is based on a certain iteration of the Anthropocene and, equally, a certainiteration of world literature. In this paper, we first review criticisms levelled at suchdominant conceptualizations–criticisms about how the universalizing human expe-rience misses crucial particulars of experiences, perspectives and, importantly, in-justice. Yet even these critiques of the“worlding”previously enacted by worldliterature and the Anthropocene together tend to institute other kinds of worlding;they introduce new blind spots. This much becomes clear when the world literatureproject (in both its conventional iterationsandits new Anthropocene variants) isviewed from the Chinese perspective. In the second half of this chapter, we discussan ongoing recent project to investigate“Anthropocene fiction”in China. The com-plexity of China’s historical position in a world ecology has implications for studyingand understanding its Anthropocene fiction–and hence for studying and under-standing Anthropocene literature as world literature. China’s Anthropocene fictionshould therefore be undertaken as a reading not from below, but frombeside.