In 1994, workers broke ground on China's Three Gorges Dam. By its
completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi
River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape
immortalized in centuries of literature and art. The controversial
history of the dam is well known; what this book uncovers are its
unexpected connections to the cultural traditions it seems to sever. By
reconsidering the dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Three
Gorges region over more than two millennia, Fixing Landscape offers
radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in
contemporary China.
Corey Byrnes argues that this monumental feat of engineering can only be
understood by confronting its status as a techno-poetic act, a form of
landscaping indebted to both the technical knowledge of engineers and to
the poetic legacies of the Gorges as cultural site. Synthesizing methods
drawn from premodern, modern, and contemporary Chinese studies, as well
as from critical geography, art history, and the environmental
humanities, Byrnes offers innovative readings of eighth-century poetry,
paintings from the twelfth through twenty-first centuries, contemporary
film, nineteenth-century British travelogues, and Chinese and Western
maps, among other sources. Fixing Landscape shows that premodern
poetry and visual art have something urgent to tell us about a
contemporary experiment in spatial production. Poems and paintings may
not build dams, but Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam would not
exist as we know it without them.