New Dynamics: Chinese Women's Poetry Enacted

The article offers a preliminary investigation of the phenomenon of female-authored poetry theater (shige juchang) in the People’s Republic of China. It discusses cross-genre explorations by a group of female poets, theater directors and artists who are all associated with the movement of “women’s poetry” (nüxing shige) that emerged in the1980s in China. The discussion focuses on two performances based on female-authored poems, “Riding a Roller Coaster Flying Toward the Future” (2011) and “Roaming the Fuchun Mountains with Huang Gongwang” (2016), which resulted from the joint efforts of four women: the poet Zhai Yongming, the poet-scholar Zhou Zan, and the theater directors Cao Kefei and Chen Si’an. Their avant-garde experiments with poetical theater document the different ways in which poetry is being translated into images, sounds, or bodily movements on stage. The paper argues that poetic exploration of writing and reciting practices has gained new momentum from emerging intermedial, visual-verbal experiments. Furthermore, it claims that interest in “poetry theater” is also driven by the search for new forms of cross-genre stage performances that could be different from the previously politicized or commercialized ones

A Journey into the City. Migrant Workers' Relation with the Urban Space and Struggle for Existence in Xu Zechen's Early Jingpiao Fiction

In contemporary China, rural-urban migrants constitute a new urban subject with entirely new identity-related issues. This study aims at demonstrating how literature can be a valid field in investigating such evolving subjectivities, through an analysis of Xu Zechen’s early novellas depicting migrants’ vicissitudes in Beijing. Combining a close reading of the texts and a review of the main social problems characterising rural-urban migration in China, this paper focuses on the representation of the identity crisis within the migrant self in Xu’s stories, taking into account the network of meanings employed by the writer to signify the objective and subjective tension between the city and the countryside

Cultural representation and self-representation of dagongmei in contemporary China

In the 1980s, working women migrant labourers, known as the dagongmei or “working sisters,” emerged as an object of interest in popular films and television dramas. These initial visual representations have since been reiterated in sequels adjusted to fit best the current rhetoric of the party-state. Concurrent to the mass media is the less-widespread phenomenon of labourer’s literature (dagong wenxue), through which we can read the dagongmei’s own (self-) representations. Eventually, after the Millennium the number of scientific publications on the dagongmei topic has also increased significantly. Bringing these different media together, this paper thematizes the aporias of dagongmei’s (self-) representations and scrutinizes various acts of utterance, asking what they mean in terms of class and gender subjectivity. I argue that for blue-collar women, becoming part of the popular media culture does not necessarily lead to the emergence of novel mass subject identifications. It can be regarded much more as a strategy of appeasement of the rural “other” based upon the idea of a high modern, highly flexible subjectivity that does not really offer much more agency than the possibility of smoother adjustment to the logic of global capitalism