[Event] Repetition and Revolt: The Poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong by Professor Margaret Hillenbrand

Events

Wednesday 18 October, 4:00-5:00 pm (UK time) – FAB5.03, University of Warwick

Prof Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford). Repetition and Revolt: The Poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong

This paper investigates the limits of cultural articulation among Chinaกฏs vast cohort of migrant workers, focusing on poetry. I begin by sketching out the peculiar precariousness of the migrant worker poet. This is an identity besieged on many sides: geographically, physically, ontologically. But it is also an identity with significant political potential precisely because of its embattled status, and because of the role of the poet as a migrant who moves through class as well as space, unsettling caste boundaries in the process. To explore this disruptive momentum, the paper close-reads a poetic sequence by Zheng Xiaoqiong ึฃะกวํ, whose howling lamentations about life and labour in the Pearl Delta factory regime have drawn comparisons with Allen Ginsberg. I argue that the discordant character of her verse stems in large part from repetition, in which a large cluster of repeated lexical units function as the component parts of an emergent dissensual poetic voice manufactured on the assembly line. I use a medium-sized textual corpus จC 37 poems in all จC as the focus of analysis to gain a purchase on how repetition operates, both within and across poems, as a means of reconfiguring what Ranciจจre calls กฐthe fabric of sensory experienceกฑ. Repetition is a strange, conflicted beast. It exists both as iteration of the mechanical kind that is hammered home on the assembly line, but also as a practice of defiant creativity. The long sequence by Zheng Xiaoqiong exemplifies repetition as unnerving and disruptive. Her recursive poetic glossary, and the arcs of meaning which it traces, show how poetry from the factory floor can break out as a rebellious voice that ruptures conventional understandings about what verse is and does.
Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on literary and visual studies in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, especially cultures of protest and secrecy. Her books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020), and On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023).

Please register here by 17th October at noon.

This paper investigates the limits of cultural articulation among Chinaกฏs vast cohort of migrant workers, focusing on poetry. I begin by sketching out the peculiar precariousness of the migrant worker poet. This is an identity besieged on many sides: geographically, physically, ontologically. But it is also an identity with significant political potential precisely because of its embattled status, and because of the role of the poet as a migrant who moves through class as well as space, unsettling caste boundaries in the process. To explore this disruptive momentum, the paper close-reads a poetic sequence by Zheng Xiaoqiong ึฃะกวํ, whose howling lamentations about life and labour in the Pearl Delta factory regime have drawn comparisons with Allen Ginsberg. I argue that the discordant character of her verse stems in large part from repetition, in which a large cluster of repeated lexical units function as the component parts of an emergent dissensual poetic voice manufactured on the assembly line. I use a medium-sized textual corpus จC 37 poems in all จC as the focus of analysis to gain a purchase on how repetition operates, both within and across poems, as a means of reconfiguring what Ranciจจre calls กฐthe fabric of sensory experienceกฑ. Repetition is a strange, conflicted beast. It exists both as iteration of the mechanical kind that is hammered home on the assembly line, but also as a practice of defiant creativity. The long sequence by Zheng Xiaoqiong exemplifies repetition as unnerving and disruptive. Her recursive poetic glossary, and the arcs of meaning which it traces, show how poetry from the factory floor can break out as a rebellious voice that ruptures conventional understandings about what verse is and does.

Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on literary and visual studies in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, especially cultures of protest and secrecy. Her books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020), and On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023).

Please register here by 17th October at noon.