Chinese Contemporary Poetry

KANTL

28 March 2023

China's Battler Poetry: Migrant Labor and the Politics of Culture

In China, since the 1980s, about three hundred million people have moved from the countryside to the cities to escape poverty and unemployment. Their precarious labour - on construction sites, at the assembly line, and so on – has fueled China’s rise, but the story of the labour migrants themselves is often one of hardship, exploitation, and fundamental socio-economic insecurity. And they write poetry.

What do they write? Is this really poetry? Why do they write? Is this something typically Chinese? What happens when this poetry travels elsewhere? Why should we read it?

Programme

20:00 Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼 & Silvia Marijnissen film: poetry & reflection

20:30 Maghiel van Crevel on Chinese Contemporary Poetry: China's Battler Poetry Interview by Nicky Aerts, followed by Q&A with the audience.

22:00 Reception & Presentation Poetry Anthology of Zheng Xiaoqiong in Dutch translation

郑小琼 Zheng Xiaoqiong

Maghiel Van Crevel is a professor of Chinese Language and Literature at

Leiden University.

Nicky Aerts

Silvia Marijnissen (°1970) is a translator of Chinese-language literature. She translated novels by Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan and Eileen Chang, modern poetry by many poets from China and Taiwan, and classical landscape poetry. Together with Anne Sytske Keijser and Mark Leenhouts, she translated the 18th-century classic De droom van de rode kamer (The dream of the red mansion), for which they received the Filter translation prize.