Abstract
Industrialization involves a range of spatial and institutional practices that “turn a young and rural body into an industrialized and productive laborer” (Pun 2005: 77), transforming “lazy” and “unproductive” laborers “bodies and minds, behaviours and beliefs, gestures and habits, and attitudes and aptitudes” (79). These practices include placing the body on individuated positions on the assembly line (Rofel 1999), and imposing the timetable. Note the following poem about how a dagong (working for the boss) migrant reacts to the factory bell:
The bell rings/hitting hard on my nerve/struggling to wake up from a lunchtime nap/time again to start the afternoon shift/a life manipulated by the bell: getting out of bed, eating, starting work, finishing work/even in my dreams I hear its piecing sound. (Zhang 2007: 46) 1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Beynon, Louise. “Dilemmas of the Heart: Rural Working Women and Their Hopes for the Future.” In On the Move: Women in Rural–to–urban Migration in Contemporary China, edited by Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, 131–50. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Blunt, Alison and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006.
Cai, Li. Shenzhen nu lawugong hunlian zhuangkuang yanjiu [Research on women migrant workers’ love and marriage]. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2008.
Chan, Anita. China’s Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001.
Chan, Anita. “The Culture of Survival: Lives of Migrant Workers through the Prism of Private Letters.” In Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, edited by Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, 163–88. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Chan, Jenny and Ngai Pun. “Suicide as Protest for the New Generation of Chinese Migrant Workers: Foxconn, Global Capital, and the State,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 37 (2010): 2–10.
Chang, Leslie. Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009.
Davis, Murray S. “Georg Simmel and the Aesthetics of Social Reality,” Social Forces 51 (1973): 320–29.
Duan, Yabin. “Dagong wenxue yu gougjian hexie shehui [Dagong poetry and the building of a harmonious society].” In Dagong Wenxue Zonghen Tan [An Overview of Migrant Literature], edited by Honghai Yang, 10–17. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2009.
Fulian Commissioned Report. Zaijing wugong nuxin hunyi jiating zhuangkuang yanjiu [A research project on the marriage and family lives of migrant women in Beijing]. Beijing University: Unpublished report prepared by the Department of Sociology, 2010.
Gaetano, Arianne M. “Filial Daughters, Modern Women: Migrant Domestic Workers in Post-Mao Beijing.” In On the Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China, edited by Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, 41–79. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Giddens, Anthony. The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. London: Unwin Hyman, 1973.
Jacka, Tamara. Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006.
Jia, He. “Hao Yuangong [Good Employees].” In 2008 Zhongguo dagong shige jingxue [Selection of Dagong Poems in China 2008], edited by Xu Qiang, Luo Deyuan, and Chen Zhongcun, Shanghai: Shanghai Arts and Culture Press, 2009.
Lamont, Michele. The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000.
Li, Qiang. Nongmin gong yu zhongguo shehui fencing [Rural Migrant Workers and Social Stratification in China]. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2004.
Liu Dacheng. “Zheng Yue [The Month of the Chinese New Year].” In Zhongguo dagong shige jingxue [Selection of Dagong Poems in China], edited by Xu Qiang, Luo Deyuan, and Chen Zhongcun, 108–12. Zhuhai: Zhuhai Publishing House, 2007.
Liu, Dongwu. Cong xiangcun dao chengshi de jinsheng taiji—Zhongguo dagong shige yanjiu [The Spiritual Birthmark in the Rural-to-Urban Transition: Research on China’s Dagong Poetry]. Guangdong: Huacheng Chubanshe, 2006.
Luo, Deyuan. “Liu Huangqi, wode dagong xiongdi [Liu Huangqi, my dagong brother].” In Zhongguo dagong shige jingxue [Selection of Dagong Poems in China], edited by Xu Qiang, Luo Deyuan, and Chen Zhongcun, 61–68. Zhuhai: Zhuhai Publishing House, 2007.
Mai, Nicola, and Russell King “Love, Sexuality and Migration: Mapping the Issue(s).” Mobilities 4, no. 3 (2009): 295–307.
McIlroy, John and Sallie Westwood, eds. Border Country: Raymond Williams in Higher Education. Leicester: NIACE, 1993.
Murphy, Rachel. How Migrant Labor is Changing Rural China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Pun, Ngai. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Pun, Ngai and Lu Huilin. “A Culture of Violence: The Labor Subcontracting System and Collective Action by Construction Workers in Post-Socialist China,” The China Journal 64 (2010): 143–58.
Rofel, Lisa. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.
Solinger, Dorothy J. Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.
Sun, Qingfeng. “Xieshi: yu wenhua wuguan [Writing poems has nothing to do with culture].” In 2009–2010 Zhongguo dagong shige jingxue [2009–2010 Selection of Dagong Poems in China], edited by Xu Qiang, Luo Deyuan, and Chen Zhongcun, 106. Shanghai: Shanghai Arts and Culture Press, 2010.
Sun, Wanning. “Narrating Translocality: Dagong Poetry and the Subaltern Imagination,” Mobilities 5, no. 3 (2010): 291–310.
Sun, Wanning. “Poetry of Labour and (Dis)articulation of Class: China’s Worker-Poets and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries,” Journal of Contemporary China. In press, 2012.
Taylor, Jenny Bourne. “Structure of Feeling.” In A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, edited by Michael Payne and Jessica Rae Barbera, 670. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin Books, 1991 [ 1963 ].
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958.
Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Yan, Hairong New Masters, New Servants: Development, Migration, and Women Workers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Yang, Honghai. “Shenzhen wenxue: xin dushi xinlin beiwanglu [Shenzhen literature: Memorandum of the Heart in the new metropolis].” In Quanqiu hua yujing xia de dangdai dushi wenxue [Contemporary Urban Literature in China and Globalization], edited by Yang, Honghai, 125–31. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2007.
Zhang Shougang. “Zai dagong qunluo li shenzhang de ci [Poems which grow out of the dagong community].” In Zhongguo dagong shige jingxue [Selection of Dagong Poems in China], edited by Xu Qiang, Luo Deyuan, and Chen Zhongcun, 36–53. Zhuhai: Zhuhai Publishing House, 2007.
Zheng, Xiaoqiong. “Shenghuo [Life].” In Yixiangren: Guangdong waisheng qingnian shixuan [Strangers in the Foreign Land: Young Migrant Poets in Guangdong], edited by Huang Lihai, 38. Guangzhou: Guacheng Press, 2007.
Zhongguo Jingji Daobao. Di er dai nongmin gong de xin tezheng he xin xianxiang [New characteristics and new phenomenon of the second generation of migrant workers], March 29, 2010. www.ceh.com.cn/ceh/shpd/2010/3/23/61128.shtml accessed August 2010.
Zhou, Zhenhua and Liu Ziqian. Nanhai bentian fugong, gongren qude jubu xing shenli [Honda workers at Nanhai resume work: workers win partial victory]. Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan [China News Weekly], June 2, 2010. www.inewsweek.cn/cnw/news/info/society/2010–06–02/6279.shtml, accessed August 2010.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2012 Andrew B. Kipnis
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sun, W. (2012). The Poetry of Spiritual Homelessness: A Creative Practice of Coping with Industrial Alienation. In: Kipnis, A.B. (eds) Chinese Modernity and the Individual Psyche. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268969_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268969_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44369-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-26896-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)