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moreICCS WPS 05 Neoliberal Intimacy: Verse of Chinese Migrant Workers
Author/Speaker｜Jing Chen
Publication Date｜2019-01
Abstract
As China has been actively participating in the reconfiguration of world structure, Chinese migrant workers have emerged as internal/international diasporic subjects and post-socialist grassroots. Their writings address the alienation, hardship, precariousness and aspirations of their diasporic experiences in big cities, which represents an emerging genre – Migrant Worker Literature (dagong wenxue, 打工文學) and demands scholarly intervention. Departing from current approaches that interpret labor poetry (dagong shige, 打工詩歌) as either uproar of the proletarian or subaltern voice from the bottom, this paper will concentrate on how Chinese migrant workers embody a new form of neoliberal intimacy in the twenty-first century within the imbalanced global economy, though they have been occupying a crucial position in the larger historical and continental connectivities. It suggests that on the one hand, the marginalized voices of labor poets uncover their desires to become urbanites and cosmopolitan citizens. On the other hand, their lyricized everyday experiences function as the denunciation of a not-yet-post-Cold War era. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this paper will also delineate the literary genealogy of the cultural figure of migrant workers, tracing how these yearning workers emerged as both vital energy and surplus in a rising China and post-Cold War global economy at large.