Long Dyings on the Grassland: Understanding the Slow Violence of Environmental Deterioration and Displacement in Tuya’s Marriage

Adopting Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence, this article studies how Chinese director, Wang Quan’an, visualizes the slow violence of environmental deterioration and displacement on the Mongolian grassland in his award-winning film, Tuya’s Marriage (2006). According to Nixon, a significant challenge in the studies of slow violence is how to make slow violence, those subtle and often overlooked harms, visible in various types of narratives. Although there are increasing studies of slow violence representation on screen, few critics pay attention to Chinese films. This article contends that Tuya’s Marriage joins the discussion by showing how stories of slow violence can be told on the Asian screen. The movie takes slow violence as its major concern and zooms in on a group of nomadic herders suffering from environmental deterioration and displacement. When they stay on the grassland, slow violence manifests through environmental deterioration such as water shortages, soil erosion, and desertification, subjecting them to physical and mental torment. When forced to leave, slow violence takes the form of environmental displacement, threatening and even eroding their social and cultural identities. The director, Wang Quan’an, brings the unseen violence to light by picturing how slow violence leads to various long dyings the grassland, the grassland people, and the grassland culture are confronted with. As an essential voice in representing slow violence on screen, Wang merits more critics’ attention.